A worker climbs on a cellular communication tower in Oakland, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
A cellular outage early on Thursday hit thousands of AT&T users in the United States, disrupting calls and text messages as well as emergency services in major cities including San Francisco.
About 58,000 incidents were reported around noon ET, according to data from outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said Thursday on a site it put up for updates on the situation. “Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”
AT&T has not said exactly how many customers were affected by Thursday’s outage and the cause was not immediately clear. The FCC said on X that it was investigating the incident and was in contact with AT&T and safety authorities.
Phones affected by the outage have displayed zero service bars in the top right corner of their device or the letters SOS. Customers were still able to make calls by enabling Wi-Fi calling.
A spike in outages began around 4:00 a.m. ET and peaked at around 74,000 reported incidents at 8:30 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.
Shares of AT&T were down about 2% Thursday morning following the outages.
The AT&T outage has impacted people’s ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911, a post on social media platform X from the San Francisco Fire Department said.
“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the fire department said on the platform.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in a post on X that the city can receive and make outbound 911 calls but that AT&T customers in the area had reported issues.
“We have received calls from AT&T customers that their cellular phones are in SOS mode. Please direct all inquiries to restore service to AT&T,” Dickens said.
The Massachusetts State Police said that people were flooding their 911 center with calls trying to determine if the service works from their cell phones.
“Please do not do this. If you can successfully place a non-emergency call to another number via your cell service then your 911 service will also work,” the state police said in a post on X.
Users of Verizon and T-Mobile were reporting a few thousand outages each as of 10:00 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.
These reports were likely due to calls made trying to connect with other networks, both companies said.
“Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.
– Reuters and CNBC’s Steven Kopack contributed to this report.
