A major cellphone outage affected users across the US early Thursday — even stopping some police departments from being able to receive 911 calls.
AT&T seemed to have experienced the largest number of issues, with nearly 32,000 reports at around 4:30 a.m., according to data from DownDetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.
More than 800 service outages were also reported on T-Mobile and Verizon, although a spokesperson for the latter put it down to users reporting problems trying to call people with other services.
It took more than 13 hours for AT&T to resolve the issue, which the company chalked up to a system overwhelm.
“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 cyberattack,” the company said in a statement.
“We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.”
Others reported issues on smaller carriers, including Boost Mobile, Consumer Cellular, Straight Talk Wireless and Cricket Wireless, the latter of which is owned by AT&T.
The problems extended from New York, Boston, and Atlanta on the East Coast to Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco — and even to Montreal in Canada.
Several police stations throughout the country even warned that people might be unable to call to report emergencies.
However, many AT&T users said they were stuck in “SOS Mode” in which they could only reach emergency services.
A spokeswoman for AT&T encouraged users to rely on Wi-Fi calling as it worked “urgently to restore service.”
A spokeswoman for AT&T said the company is working “urgently to restore service.”
By 11:30 a.m., the company announced that three-quarters of its network had been restored.
Full service was restored by 2:15 p.m.
“We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future,” AT&T said.
The Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the incident, while the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it was working with AT&T to understand the cause.
White House spokesman John Kirby said the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were looking into the AT&T outage, but had no reason to believe it was connected to a cyberattack.
