Three-quarters of AT&T’s network has been restored, the company said, following a nationwide cell phone outage that affected thousands of customers on Thursday and interfered with emergency services in key cities, text messaging, and phone calls.
The telecom company, which serves over 290 million customers all over the United States, has been dealing with service outages for more than eight hours. Customers of T-Mobile and Verizon also reported occasional network failures, though they didn’t seem to be as common.
The digital-service tracking website DownDetector received reports of outages from almost 44,000 AT&T users – although the website only records outages that the users voluntarily report. Outage reports decreased slightly at 5 a.m. ET but increased again at 7 a.m. ET hour and are still rising as of now.
According to the same source, around 1,000 outages were reported by Verizon and T-Mobile users on Thursday morning. Requests for response from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were not immediately answered.
AT&T stated on its website that “we are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers,” without mentioning the reason for the outage or the quantity of consumers that were impacted.
According to a post by the San Francisco Fire Department on social networking site X, the outage was affecting people’s ability to contact emergency services by dialing 911.
“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the fire department said on the platform.
