There are service outages and then there’s the massive blackout that AT&T suffered on Thursday. Wireless research firm Opensignal tracked the problem and came up with a graphic that showed just how far-reaching the problems were.
Here’s a graphic they put together tracking which states suffered the worst and how bad things got in the early hours of the day.
The map showed that problems started to show in Maine and New Hampshire and other parts of the northeast tip around 3 a.m. ET before everything went haywire an hour later. During the first two hours, a vast majority of the country saw its service cut out, with phones showing an SOS icon.
AT&T was able to get nearly half the country back up within two hours, but seemed to be stuck there for a while. The eastern half of the country was completely out for hours more. Around 11 a.m. ET, the company updated customers that three quarters of the network had been restored. Around 3 p.m. ET, the company said that it had been fully restored.
As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Wyoming seemingly didn’t have many problems, based on the Opensignal data.
OpenSignal also showed the network activity for T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, which were both largely in the green, aside from a slight degradation in Montana for Verizon. That jives with the comments that both carriers made on Thursday, with both saying they hadn’t been affected by any issues.
The outage is a black eye for AT&T at a time when the wireless companies have been scrambling to burnish their reputation for network quality. The company hasn’t yet discussed the cause of the problem.