WASHINGTON — Many of AT&T’s customers were left without service Thursday because of a massive outage across the U.S., leaving them unable to place calls, send texts or access the internet.
Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported some network outages.
At least 60,000 customers have reported issues with their network on outage-tracking site DownDetector as of 8 a.m. Eastern, almost double the 35,000 reporting problems an hour earlier.
Outages began around 3 a.m. Eastern, and although they fell a bit around 4 a.m., the number quickly bounced back and rose higher.
AT&T did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage.
The telecommunications giant has encountered a number of sporadic outages over the past few days, including a 911 outage in some parts of the southeastern U.S.
Other networks appeared to be having some similar difficulties, but on a smaller scale. Nearly 3,400 Verizon customers reported outages Thursday to DownDetector. About 1,400 T-Mobile customers were out of service in the same time period.
The outages appear to have begun at roughly the same time as AT&T’s connection issues.
Customers still appear to have access to “SOS mode,” which allows cell phone users without access to regular service to call 911 in an emergency, piggybacking off of other networks nearby to do so.
The outage became a major trend on social media overnight, with users on X (formerly Twitter) flocking to a number of hashtags to discuss the issue. Although #CyberAttack was one of the trending hashtags associated with the outage, there is no indication that an attack was the cause of the outage.
It’s also unclear when service will be restored to affected customers.
