AT&T Cellular Outage Hits Customers Across U.S.

An AT&T cellular outage Thursday morning left tens of thousands of customers unable to place calls, text or access the internet.

According to DownDetector, the digital service tracking site, more than 74,000 customers have reported outages. Among the most reported locations are New York City, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami and Indianapolis.

In addition, AT&T customers reported outages in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and more.

“I had plans out of the house today and am now homebound because of the outage,” one customer posted on DownDetector. “Can’t use [GPS] without cellular. And now I can’t reschedule my SSA appointment. I’m placing blame on ATT if I lose my SSI and Medicaid over this.” 

AT&T sent us the following statement about the cellular outage:

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”

AT&T told CNN that some parts of its network are beginning to recover, but it did not have a time frame for when its system would be fully restored. AT&T has been responding to customer complaints online, asking them to send direct messages to customer service.

Cellular Outage Impacting AT&T Partners

“Our customers are more concerned about the lack of information coming out of AT&T than anything else," said Rob DeVita, CEO of Mejeticks, which sells AT&T. "Wireless is a mission-critical application now for some of our customers. I expect a significant shift to multi-carrier SIM deployments in the future. It is essentially wait and see when AT&T will grace them with an update."

Christopher Brunetti, vice president of sales at Bridgepointe Technologies, also an AT&T partner, said considering the recent cellular outage, "our strategists are reporting that this unfortunate event is driving clients to seek our advice on how they can better protect their enterprises from disruption."

"We are having a lot of diversity, resiliency and business continuity discussions that involve all levels of a client’s architecture," he said. "We’re working with them to look at alternate technologies suppliers and designs to fit the budgets and desired outcome.”

Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported some network outages, but they appear to be far less widespread.

Verizon sent us the following statement:

“Verizon's network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation”

T-Mobile tells us it didn't experience an outage.

“Our network is operating normally,” it said. “DownDetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”