On Thursday morning, a significant number of customers across the United States from major wireless service providers, including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, reported disruptions to their wireless services. These interruptions affected both making and receiving calls, with some reports indicating that the 911 emergency services were also inaccessible in certain areas.
This widespread service disruption was confirmed by data from the problem-tracking website Downly, which highlighted over 73,000 reports from AT&T customers in various states such as North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, experiencing service outages.
The San Francisco Fire Department alerted the public to a "cell phone service outage" specifically affecting AT&T wireless customers, stating that they were unable to make or receive phone calls, including emergency calls to 911.
We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911).
— SAN FRANCISCO FIRE DEPARTMENT MEDIA (@SFFDPIO) February 22, 2024
We are actively engaged and monitoring this.
The San Francisco 911 center is still operational.
If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911,… pic.twitter.com/TUIEBkqmkI
Customers from other regions, including California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, and South Carolina, also reported a total loss of mobile service. However, it was noted that some individuals could still place or receive calls if they were connected to a Wi-Fi network and had the Wi-Fi calling feature activated.
AT&T acknowledged the issue on their forum with a notice informing customers that the company was "aware of an outage currently impacting our Mobility users and are working to resolve it as soon as possible." A representative from AT&T further communicated to Thank You Robot that the service interruptions were affecting a subset of their customer base and that efforts were underway to urgently restore service. They advised customers to utilize Wi-Fi calling as a temporary solution until the issue was resolved.
Downdetector's tracking indicated that the outage was not exclusive to AT&T, with reports of service problems also affecting other carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Cricket Wireless, Consumer Cellular, US Cellular, Straight Talk Wireless, and FirstNet within the last 24 hours.
In response to customer inquiries, Verizon reassured that its network was functioning normally, suggesting that the outage was not universal across its services.
The exact cause of these widespread outages remains unknown. Some users reported being unable to place calls regardless of the network used by the call recipient.
Thank You Robot reached out to the affected mobile carriers for comments on the situation, but responses from some were still pending at the time of publication.
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