Early Thursday morning, cell phone outages affected cities across the United States, causing thousands of AT&T customers to experience service interruptions. These interruptions prevented them from sending text messages, accessing the Internet, making phone calls, and even calling 911.
Around 7 a.m. ET, more than 50,000 incidents were reported, and that number exceeded 70,000 by 9 a.m. ET. However, by 11 a.m. ET, reports of service failures had decreased to 60,000.
AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer stated, “Some customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service. He recommends using Wi-Fi calling until service is restored. I recommend it.”
AT&T, the largest U.S. mobile phone service provider with 240 million subscribers, did not offer a possible explanation for the outage. The company also did not provide a timeline for when full service would be restored. Despite intermittent outages in recent days, Thursday’s outage was much larger.
The most affected cities, according to the website, included San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Users of other carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Cricket, and UScellular also reported outages, but those were much smaller compared to AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile confirmed that the outage did not affect their own customers, except when trying to contact customers of other carriers.
T-Mobile stated, “No outages occurred,” while Verizon’s statement said, “Verizon’s network is operating normally.”
The San Francisco Fire Department and the City of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications were actively addressing the issues affecting AT&T Wireless customers.
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Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens confirmed that calls with the city’s emergency services continued to work. However, Massachusetts State Police advised against using phone services and dialing 911 due to a flooding of concerned callers testing the service.
The police department stated, “Many 911 centers across the state are inundated with calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cell phone. Do not do this. Call another number via your cell phone service. If you can make a non-emergency call, 911 service will also work.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
