Tens of thousands of AT&T customers Reported issues Cell phone service was cut off Thursday morning, and a map shows people affected across the United States.
Customers on other networks have said they've also experienced problems, but rival carriers Verizon, T-Mobile and US Cellular say their networks are up and that their users are probably people on AT&T's network. He pointed out that it was difficult to contact him.
Around 11 a.m. ET Thursday, AT&T announced that it had made progress restoring its network. By mid-afternoon, it said service was fully restored.
“We have restored wireless service to all affected customers,” AT&T said in a statement at 3:10 p.m. ET. “We offer our sincere apologies to them. Maintaining connections with our customers remains our top priority and we are taking steps to ensure they never experience this again in the future.”
Late Thursday night, the company announced that the outage was due to a software bug.
“Based on our initial investigation, we believe today's outage was caused by the incorrect application and execution of the processes used in expanding our network, rather than a cyber attack,” the company said on its website. “We are continuing to assess today’s outage to ensure we continue to provide the service our customers deserve.”
We will introduce the areas affected by the power outage.
AT&T Outage Map
Downdetector had about 40,000 reports of service issues from AT&T customers around noon ET, down from more than 70,000 reports at its peak. Most of the complaints centered on issues with cell phone and wireless service.
According to Down Detector, the areas with the most power outages were Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, New York, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta and Indianapolis.
What caused the AT&T outage?
The company attributed the outage to a software bug.
The failure infuriated 911 centers, and some law enforcement officials noted that some people were calling emergency numbers to test whether their phones were working.
Officials urged people to refrain from calling 911 to test their cellphones.
“Many 911 centers across the state are being flooded with calls from people trying to find out if 911 is working from their cell phones. Please don't do this,” the Massachusetts State Police wrote on Twitter. I wrote it in.
Taylor Johnston contributed to this report.
