Nationwide cell service outage affecting Georgia customers, 911 calls. Here's what we know

Did you wake up this morning, reach for your phone and then fail to get a connection?

Tens of thousands of cell-phone users woke up Thursday to no service on their phones with outages reported from T-Mobile, Verizon and especially AT&T, according to the Downdetector virtual platform. The Atlanta area was marked as one of the worst cities for these incidents.

The outages seemed to start at about 4 a.m. and quickly surged to more than 30,000, according to AT&T. At about 7 a.m., more than 19,000 Verizon customers and more than 800 T-Mobile customers also reported "SOS" or similar messages on their phones.

The carriers have been fielding customer complaints all morning. On AT&T's website there's a message that reads: "Some customers in your area are having trouble making or receiving calls. As a result, we are experiencing long hold times. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are working to resolve this issue."

The company has also been responding to customers on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying there is no timeframe to resolve the issue and that they are working to restore service. In the meantime, AT&T recommends connecting your smartphone to a Wi-Fi network to make calls and texts.

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Other companies are sharing similar messages with Consumer Cellular, a virtual operator powered by AT&T and T-Mobile, posting: "We have been notified that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are reporting nationwide outages. The carriers are aware of this issue and are working as quickly as possible to resolve this issue. At this time we do not have an estimated restoral time."

For those concerned for their safety, the National 911 program says all wireless phones, even those that are not subscribed to or supported by a specific carrier, can still call 911. However, calls to 911 on phones without active service do not deliver the caller’s location to the 911 call center, and the call center cannot call these phones back to find out the caller’s location or the nature of the emergency. If disconnected, the 911 center has no way to call back the caller.

It's also important to remember that not all customers of the affected providers are experiencing outages and this does not mean all services powered by the internet are down. For the time being, Wi-Fi is still enabling many services, including iMessaging for iPhone users.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Cell phone outages in Georgia from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile