A employee climbs on a cellular communication tower in Oakland, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
A cellular outage Thursday hit hundreds of AT&T users in the US, disrupting calls and text messages in addition to emergency services in major cities including San Francisco. The corporate said service was restored to all affected customers shortly after 3 p.m. ET.
“Keeping our customers connected stays our top priority, and we’re taking steps to make sure our customers don’t experience this again in the longer term,” the corporate said in an announcement.
AT&T said late Thursday that based on an initial review, the outage was “brought on by the applying and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack.” The corporate will proceed to evaluate the outage.
About 58,000 incidents were reported around noon ET, based on data from outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
AT&T, which put up an internet site for system updates, didn’t say how many shoppers were affected by Thursday’s outage. The FCC said on X that it was investigating the incident and was involved with AT&T and safety authorities.
Shares of AT&T closed 2.41% lower Thursday.
Phones affected by the outage displayed zero service bars in the highest right corner of the device or the letters SOS. Customers were still capable of 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, based on Downdetector.
The AT&T outage affected people’s ability to achieve emergency services by dialing 911, a post on social media platform X from the San Francisco Fire Department said.
“We’re aware of a problem impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the fireplace department said.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in a post on X that the town could receive and make outbound 911 calls but that AT&T customers in the world had reported issues.
“We’ve received calls from AT&T customers that their cellular phones are in SOS mode. Please direct all inquiries to revive service to AT&T,” Dickens said.
The Massachusetts State Police said that individuals were flooding their 911 center with calls trying to find out if the service worked from their cell phones.
“Please don’t do that. If you happen to can successfully place a non-emergency call to a different number via your cell service then your 911 service can even work,” the state police said in a post on X.
Users of Verizon and T-Mobile reported just a few thousand outages each as of 10:00 a.m. ET, based on Downdetector.
The reports were likely attributable to calls made attempting to connect with other networks, each corporations said.
“Downdetector is probably going reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect with users on other networks,” T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.
– Reuters, CNBC’s Steven Kopack and Chris Eudaily contributed to this report.