AT&T restores cell service following widespread outage Thursday
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Nearly 12 hours after reports started of AT&T’s cellular service being disrupted nationwide, all services have been restored, the telecommunications company announced at 12:10 p.m. Thursday.
The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management was monitoring the reported cellular outages of multiple service providers nationwide Thursday morning. City officials said the outages may impact calls to 911.
The outages started overnight at around 12:30 a.m.
AT&T had more than 73,000 outages around 6:30 a.m. Thursday. Cricket Wireless, owned by AT&T, had more than 13,000, according to data from Downdetector.
“If you cannot get through to 911, please connect to your Wi-Fi network and enable Wi-Fi calling,” SF DEM said just before 8 a.m. on X. If Wi-Fi was not available, officials suggested using a landline.
“If that is not an option then please try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 911 on your behalf,” the city’s Department of Emergency Management said.
The San Francisco 911 center was operational throughout the outage. Emergency officials advised the community not to text or call 911 just to test if their phone service was working.
In the South Bay, the Santa Clara County Fire Department said Thursday morning the county’s 911 call center “has not received reports of issues or seen dips in call volume.”
“At this time, the issue appears to be resolved,” the San Jose Police Department said at 9:53 a.m. “In the event of similar outage in the future, seek assistance from a neighbor or friend with a different cell carrier or utilize a landline phone.”
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and Marin County Sheriff’s Office reported that their counties’ 911 dispatches remained fully operational.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers,” AT&T and Cricket said in an update around 9 a.m.
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Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,900 outages. Boost Mobile had more than 700 outages.
According to statements from Verizon and T-Mobile, the two company’s networks were “operating normally” and attributed the perceived outages of their networks to customers trying to connect to users on other networks.
An SOS message may have been seen in the status bar for some affected iPhone users. While these phones may not be able to connect through their paid provider’s network, the devices can still make emergency calls through other carrier networks, according to Apple Support.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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