A nationwide cellular system outage interrupted a wide range of mobile phone and internet access Thursday morning. It was afternoon before AT&T reported service was restored to all.
The outage affected Dallas-based AT&T along with other carriers like Cricket Wireless and Verizon.
At 2:10 p.m. Thursday, AT&T reported service had been restored to all affected wireless customers and apologized for the inconvenience.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com the number of reports of AT&T outages peaked at nearly 32,000 around 3:30 a.m. but there had been many more since then.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” AT&T said in a statement released in the morning.
“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
The KRLD newsroom contacted the Dallas 9-1-1 center which reporred it was up and operating, but other major cities had reported 9-1-1 outages.
MedStar's Matt Zavadsky says their system has been affected. But he advises that cell phone users set up what's known as "wifi calling" which can be set up on both Android and Apple phones.
As long as you're in a location where wifi is working you should be able to make calls. But he stresses that, if this is the first time you've used wifi calling you will have to set it up with your home address so that in the event of an emergency first responders will be able to locate you.
The Grand Prairie 9-1-1 center posted information on X this morning, saying "We are aware of the current cell phone outage with AT&T users. If you are unable to get through to 911, try connecting to your WiFi AND enabling WiFi calling. To do this, go to your phone settings and search WiFi at the top. Click on the phone and turn on WiFi calling."
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story stated that T-Mobile experienced an outage. A spokesperson for T-Mobile sent KRLD the following statement: "We did not experience an outage. Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks."
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