Update: AT&T says service has been fully restored.
AT&T said that it has restored service to three-quarters of its network, and is still working to get the rest back up.
The response comes after people woke up this morning to a massive nationwide outage. The problem appeared to start around 4 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which has seen the rate of incident reports fall, but are still at unusually high levels.
AT&T’s outage follows another widespread service disruption last month from Verizon Wireless, although AT&T’s problem appears to have affected more areas. While not frequent, these sorts of outages happen and cause massive disruption considering how dependent we all are on our phones.
The outage caused spikes in Downdetector reports on Verizon and T-Mobile, but both denied having issues, and blamed the the problems on AT&T’s outage.
On Thursday, a Verizon spokesman confirmed its network was 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,” he said.
T-Mobile likewise said its network was fine. “We did not experience an outage,” said a spokeswoman. “Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
Those affected saw SOS symbols on their phones. While iPhones are supposed to call 911 in SOS mode, if you’re phone is off of the cellular network, it’s suggested you move to a Wi-Fi network instead.
A spokesman for AT&T wasn’t immediately available to provide an update. The last update on X (formerly Twitter) came at 11:15 a.m. ET.
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