Most of us were in for a sad surprise this Thursday morning. If you woke up and found yourself unable to text, call, or surf the internet like you usually do every morning, you weren’t the only one. Many people found that they had no cellphone service when they awoke. Starting very early on Thursday morning, there was a nationwide cellphone outage with service outages across main cellphone providers in the U.S., mainly with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
However, there also appeared to be network issues with Cricket, Consumer Cellular, Boost Mobile, and other regional services, according to Downdetector. AT&T users first saw a spike in outages at 1:25 am PST with 30,862 outage reports, according to the tracking site DownDetector. The problem quickly escalated to 73,974 reported outages at 6:10 am PST. Here is a map of the most affected areas around the United States.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them,” AT&T announced in a statement. “We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”
Additionally, Verizon issued the following statement “Verizon’s network remains fully operational. Some customers may have experienced issues this morning when calling or texting those served by another carrier. Our network continues to function normally.”
T-Mobile provided an update on the nationwide network issues by stating “We did not experience an outage. Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
- AT&T users can sign up for text alerts about outages, or you can visit the AT&T website here for more specific service outage information.
- Verizon users can visit their website here to learn more specific service outage information. They also have a support page, specific to outages.
- T-Mobile users can visit their website here for more specific information. T-Mobile doesn’t appear to have an active outage map, but T-Mobile users can visit their troubleshooting page for service issues.