AT&T cellular outage leaves tens of thousands stranded across the US
ST. LOUIS — A major cellular outage impacted tens of thousands across the US on Thursday. On Thursday afternoon, AT&T released a statement saying, “We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”
“Reports started at about 12:45 a.m., when tens of thousands of people started to say, ‘Hey, my phone’s not working.’ That’s a large number for the middle of the night,” said Kurt Knutsson, The CyberGuy.
This is AT&T’s second major outage within a week.
The carrier released a statement saying, “Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of wi-fi calling until service is restored.”
“It is something that’s a little bit worrisome,” said Priscilla Alonzo-Rael, who was impacted by the outage.
Alonzo-Rael told us she wasn’t sure why her phone’s GPS and text messages weren’t working Thursday morning.
“I thought it was my phone, but I just ignored it and went to work and then a few of my co-workers were like, ‘Yeah, it’s out,’” added Alonzo-Rael.
Douglas Salyers said he couldn’t check in on his son.
“It was important for me to be able to contact him. That just made it really difficult,” said Salyers.
Digital service tracking site Downdetector says people were impacted in multiple parts of the country, hitting states like Texas and Georgia the hardest.
“All up and down the eastern seaboard, the central part of the U.S., Houston is a big reporting number there, stretching all the way out here to the west,” said Knutsson.
Both Verizon and T-Mobile say their service is fine. The problems only occur when their users try to call people with AT&T.
T-Mobile said, “We did not experience an outage. Our network is operating normally. Down detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
Verizon says its network is “operating normally.”
“This just doesn’t happen. You just don’t have multiple wireless networks go down simultaneously and have this level of outage.”
The FCC tweeted, “We are aware of the reported wireless outages, and our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau is actively investigating. We are in touch with AT&T and public safety authorities, including FirstNet, as well as other providers.”
Missouri U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt released a statement that reads, in part, “It’s important we continue to work to ensure that our telecommunications networks are resilient and hardened against the malign activities of nations that seek to do us harm.”
“What if something major happened? I have no access to the outside world because I’m not getting my incoming messages or everything like that,” added Alonzo-Rael.
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