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Several phone service providers, including AT&T, were down for many users across the United States Thursday morning, according to DownDetector.com, a company that tracks telecommunications and Internet disruptions.
The outage, which affected users in cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Dallas, was first reported around 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, and was still being widely reported four hours later.
AT&T did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company said on its website that there were also wireless outages in San Diego, Richmond and Milwaukee, with the initial cause listed as “maintenance activity.”
As of 7:30 a.m., nearly 50,000 people were reporting to DownDetector that they were experiencing problems with AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile were seeing much smaller numbers of reports, about 3,000 and 1,000 respectively.
The San Francisco Fire Department said on social media that it was aware of an issue affecting AT&T users who were attempting to call 911. “We are actively engaged and monitoring this,” the fire department said. “If you are an AT&T customer and cannot reach 911, please try calling from a landline.”
Small-scale outages were reported by some users of Cricket Wireless, Verizon, FirstNet and T-Mobile.
In an e-mail, T-Mobile said: “We did not experience any outages. Our network is working normally. The downdetector is likely reflecting the challenges our customers were experiencing attempting to connect to users on other networks.
This is a developing story.
