A substantial cellphone outage swept across the United States early Thursday, causing significant disruptions, including hindering some police departments’ ability to receive emergency 911 calls.
The majority of these issues were reported by AT&T customers. DownDetector—a service that monitors outages by compiling status reports from various sources, including direct user feedback—logging nearly 32,000 problems around 4:30 a.m.
T-Mobile and Verizon subscribers also faced connectivity challenges, with more than 800 service disruptions reported for each. While AT&T took some blame, other cellular service providers blamed everyone but themselves.
“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,” AT&T said in a statement.
“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
T-Mobile said that it 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,” T-Mobile said.
Amid the chaos, concerns grew as several police departments across the country highlighted the potential risk to individuals attempting to call for emergency services. Meanwhile, certain AT&T users found themselves restricted to “SOS Mode,” allowing them only to contact emergency services, as reported by affected customers.
The geographic spread of the outage was vast, affecting metropolitan areas from New York, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to Seattle in the U.S., and even reaching Montreal in Canada.
The public’s frustration has been mounting due to the lack of communication; as of now, none of the major service providers have released official statements regarding the cause or prognosis of the outage.
The outages did not go over well on social media, with many expressing frustration. Customers voiced their displeasure online, with one aggrieved AT&T subscriber commenting on X, “AT&T is literally one of the most expensive phone companies, and y’all have the audacity to have a service outage for hours with zero updates being given to your customers? Y’all got one hour to wrap this up! Fix it and fix it now.”
• Staff can be reached at 202-636-3000.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.