A nationwide cell service outage Thursday morning prevented some AT&T customers from making or receiving calls, including emergency calls.
Outages on the AT&T network and its discount carrier, Cricket Wireless, began spiking in the early morning hours and quickly grew to tens of thousands of reports on the website DownDetector, peaking shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern time and gradually decreasing for the rest of the morning.
Shortly after 11 a.m., AT&T said service was back for most people. “Three-quarters of our network has been restored,” company spokesman Jim Greer said in a statement. “We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers,” he said.
Emergency centers in several states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Texas and California, reported that the outages prevented people from making emergency calls from their cellphones. Customers were advised to use a landline for any calls, or find a cellphone that uses a different carrier.
Affected customers should try WiFi calls on their phones until regular cell service is restored, Greer said.
Verizon said its service was not interrupted. “Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier,” Verizon spokeswoman Mariana Schlock said in an email. “We are continuing to monitor the situation.”
T-Mobile also said its network did not suffer an outage. “Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said.
AT&T did not provide a cause for its problems, but in a reply to one complaint on social media, the company referred to maintenance work.
“I would like to thank you for your patience while our systems are undergoing planned maintenance/being optimized for performance,” AT&T Help said on the social media site X.
Jacob Saur, administrator of Arlington County Public Safety Communications and Emergency Management in Virginia, said the department stopped receiving 911 calls from AT&T users around 6:30 a.m. and started receiving calls again around 6:45 a.m. The department detected no outages from other carriers and was still able to receive emergency texts from AT&T users, he said.
After communicating with other emergency departments, the Arlington County agency determined it was an outage throughout the Washington metropolitan area, Saur said.
Local governments across the country said the outage caused various disruptions to their own emergency services. The Massachusetts state police said many of the state’s emergency centers were being flooded with calls from people trying to see if 911 works. “Please do not do this,” the Massachusetts state police said on X.
The city of Upper Arlington, Ohio, notified residents in a message on X that the AT&T outage was affecting some fire alarms, in which the fire department may not be notified when an alarm is activated. The city told residents to follow up any fire alarms with 911 calls.
AT&T customer Chip Chace said his cellphone had no service at 8:20 a.m. He said his cell service was off when he woke up Thursday at 6:30 a.m., with his service bars reading “SOS.”
“It’s definitely frustrating,” said Chace, a teacher from Fork Union, Va. “My wife works in D.C. during the week, so not being able to use my phone to talk to her in the morning while I take our son to day care is not ideal.”
Chace, who spoke to The Washington Post via direct messages on X, said he hoped the problem would be resolved soon. “It’s concerning because you don’t realize how important your cellphone is until you can’t use it,” he said.
