Happy Thursday! February is drawing to a close, the weather is getting slightly warmer in parts of the country, and AT&T experienced a massive outage that affected its cellular and internet services. It was a bit of a mess.
How many people were without service? When was service be restored? Here’s a quick recap of what you need to know.
When did the AT&T outage start?
Around 4 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 22, more than 32,000 outages were reported across AT&T’s network. Once 7 a.m. rolled around, that number jumped to over 50,000 people. Per the Down Detector website, there were nearly 75,000 outage reports just before 9:15 a.m. ET.
Is the AT&T outage over?
Thankfully, the AT&T outage has finally ended. At 11:15 a.m. ET, the company had restored “three-quarters” of its network. Then, at 3:10 p.m. ET, AT&T confirmed that it had “restored wireless service to all our affected customers.”
AT&T further 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.”
Where was the AT&T outage happening?
Once again, looking at Down Detector, the areas most severely impacted by the AT&T outage appear to have been Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. There were also outage reports throughout the state of Florida, parts of Michigan, and New York.
In addition to the reports coming in on the Down Detector website, you can also use AT&T’s own outage map to see if there are any reported issues in your specific area.
Were other cellular networks down?
Although AT&T experienced the worst of the issues, it wasn’t the only cellular carrier with ongoing outages. Cricket Wireless, a prepaid carrier that uses AT&T’s network, was also showing over 12,000 outage reports as of 9:15 a.m. ET. Verizon outage reports spiked at over 4,000 this morning, in addition to increasing outage reports for Consumer Cellular, T-Mobile, Boost Mobile, US Cellular, and Straight Talk.
In the case of Verizon and T-Mobile, specifically, both carriers have confirmed that their networks weren’t directly experiencing service outages and that reports on sites like Down Detector were likely a result of Verizon and T-Mobile users trying to call or text people on AT&T.
