On Thursday, there were outages that prevented thousands of AT&T customers in the US from using their phones to send or receive texts or make calls. People in major cities like Indianapolis, Louisville, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta have been affected by the outage, which started at around 4:30 am ET.
In response to the reports, AT&T declared that it was aware of the problem and was working on a solution. Customers could still use Wi-Fi to send and receive texts and phone calls during this time. While not as many as with AT&T, other carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cricket Wireless have also reported outages.
After several hours, AT&T allegedly gave all impacted customers their wireless service back. Over 70,000 customers were reportedly affected by the outage. The outage sparked numerous theories and even federal investigations. Cyberattack was excluded from the investigation as a possible cause, though. Currently, AT&T’s 5G network serves more than 290 million people in the United States. The network outages continued for more than ten hours.
After a few hours, AT&T released an official statement claiming that the incorrect process that was applied and carried out during the carrier’s network expansion was the cause of the outage. On its website, AT&T stated, “We are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”
In addition to AT&T, other carriers that experienced signal failure included T Mobile and Verizon. At approximately 4:30 am (ET), AT&T outage reports skyrocketed to over 30,000, while Verizon customers reported over 3,000 outages and T Mobile reported over 1,000 outages. Cricket Wireless and Boost Mobile experienced outages as well, though they weren’t as bad.
After the outage, professionals advised people to learn how to use Wi-Fi calling and locate Wi-Fi hotspots. Additionally, they recommended that users know friends or neighbours who have different service providers so they can call 911 in an emergency.
