Over 70,000 AT&T customers across the United States reported cellular outages on Thursday morning, according to Downdetector. Thousands of AT&T customers reported that their phones displayed “SOS” in the status bar, indicating they had no service but could still make emergency calls. It’s currently unknown what the cause of the outage is.
“We are aware of an outage currently impacting our Mobility users and are working to resolve it ASAP,” said AT&T in a banner on its community forum.
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“I would like to thank you for your patience while our systems are undergoing planned maintenance/being optimized for performance,” said AT&T’s Help account on X in response to a customer reporting an outage Thursday morning. “We don’t have an estimated time frame,” said the help account in response to another customer.
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All of AT&T’s network has now been restored, according to an update issued by AT&T at 3:10 p.m. ET. Most cellular outages seem to be resolved according to Downdetector at 3:15 p.m. ET.
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Customers of other major U.S. carriers also reported outages in fewer numbers on Thursday morning. These include Cricket Mobile with over 10,000 outages, Verizon with over 4,000, and T-Mobile with over 1,900. FirstNet, a network for first responders powered by AT&T, also appeared to be having outages, first reported by The Verge. It’s unclear what the connection is at this time.
Cricket Mobile acknowledged that multiple networks were facing outages in a tweet. Cricket is owned by AT&T and does make use of the same cell towers.
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Verizon and T-Mobile both claim their networks are operating normally, despite thousands of reported service disruptions. Verizon’s Help account said its users are only experiencing issues when calling or texting customers affected by outages, such as AT&T and Cricket Mobile.
Downdetector shows that most AT&T’s outage reports came from Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, San Antonio, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, and New York City. Wifi services from AT&T appeared to be largely unaffected by the service disruption.
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AT&T did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
T-Mobile experienced a similarly widespread outage last year, where over 80,000 customers reported service disruptions. In that case, T-Mobile president Neville Ray attributed the issues to a third-party fiber interruption issue. That February outage was resolved after roughly one day of disruptions.
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