AT&T said on Thursday afternoon that it had finally fully restored its service after an outage knocked out coverage throughout the country.
It’s unclear how widespread the outage was, but it was clearly far reaching. Downdetector saw a massive spike in reports starting around 4 a.m. ET, and the company said at 11 a.m. ET that it had restored service to three-quarters of its network. Around 3 p.m. ET, or about 11 hours after the outage began, service had been fully restored, an AT&T spokeswoman confirmed to Cord Cutters News.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” she said. “We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.”
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 was large enough that Downdetector also saw spikes in reports on Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile’s services, but those companies blamed calls made to AT&T users.
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.
“We did not experience an outage,” said a T-Mobile 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.