On Thursday morning, a substantial number of AT&T customers reported issues with their cellular service, with an outage map indicating widespread impact across the United States.
Although customers of other networks also encountered difficulties, rival carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, and UScellular affirmed the operational status of their networks.
They suggested that their users might face challenges in reaching individuals on AT&T’s network.
Around 11 am Eastern Time on Thursday, AT&T announced progress in the restoration of its network.
By mid-afternoon, it confirmed full service restoration.
In a statement issued at 3:10 pm Eastern Time, AT&T conveyed apologies for the disruption, asserting that wireless service had been reinstated for all affected customers.
The company emphasized its commitment to prioritizing customer connectivity and outlined measures to prevent future occurrences of such disruptions.
Later on Thursday night, the company attributed the outage to a software bug.
The company stated on its website, “Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack.” They further added, “We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.”
AT&T Outage Map and Caused of Outage
Around noon Eastern Time, Downdetector received approximately 40,000 reports of service disruptions from AT&T customers, which decreased from a peak of over 70,000 reports. Predominantly, the grievances centered on issues concerning mobile phones or wireless service.
According to Downdetector, the most severe outages were observed in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, New York, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and Indianapolis.
The following presents the top 15 U.S. cities where AT&T outages and associated problems were reported:
- Houston, Texas: 24,321 reports
- Chicago, Illinois: 23,698 reports
- Dallas, Texas: 19,778 reports
- San Antonio, Texas: 16,030 reports
- New York City, New York: 15,925 reports
- Atlanta, Georgia: 14,799 reports
- Austin, Texas: 13,767 reports
- Miami, Florida: 12,488 reports
- Indianapolis, Indiana: 11,831 reports
- Charlotte, North Carolina: 11,210 reports
- Louisville, Kentucky: 9,424 reports
- Orlando, Florida: 8,868 reports
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 8,548 reports
- St. Louis, Missouri: 7,963 reports
- Columbus, Ohio: 7,775 reports
The company attributed the outage to a software bug.
The disruption affected 911 centers, with some law enforcement officials observing individuals testing their phone connectivity by dialing the emergency number.
Authorities advised against testing phones by calling 911.
The Massachusetts State Police, using the former Twitter platform, urged individuals to refrain from inundating 911 centers with unnecessary calls to verify phone functionality.