Source: CNN
AT&T's network went down Thursday morning for many of its customers in the US. This meant that customers could not make calls, send texts, or connect to the internet.
Customers of Verizon and T-Mobile also reported some network problems, but they didn't seem to affect as many people. Even though AT&T's service went down, T-Mobile and Verizon said their networks were not affected. users who reported outages may not have been able to call AT&T users.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF THE SERVICE DOESN'T WORK?
Wi-Fi talking can be used if you are an AT&T customer and can't talk on the phone, text, or connect to the internet. It's possible to make calls and send texts if you have Wi-Fi.
On the digital service tracking site DownDetector, more than 73,000 AT&T customers said they were having problems. That's not a full number; it only keeps track of failures that people report themselves. Outage reports went down a bit at 5 a.m. ET, but they went back up at 7 a.m. ET and are still going up.
AT&T said that many people were having trouble with their service, but they didn't say why the system was down.
"This morning, some of our customers are having trouble with their wireless service." AT&T said in a statement, "We are working quickly to get them back online." "Until service is back up, we recommend calling over Wi-Fi."
The business said that some parts of its network are starting to work again, but it didn't say when the whole system would be back up and running. AT&T has been answering online complaints from customers by telling them to send a direct message to customer service.
The reason AT&T went down
Over the past few days, AT&T has had a number of breakdowns. In some parts of the southeast United States, 911 services were temporarily cut off. blackouts do happen sometimes, but across the whole country, long-lasting blackouts are very uncommon.
An anonymous person in the industry said that the problem seems to have something to do with hopping, which is how cell phone services move calls from one network to the next. AT&T did not give an official reason for the outage.
The outage on Thursday didn't seem to be caused by a cyberattack or other bad behavior, according to a person in the business.
It's not uncommon for carriers to be quiet about why their networks go down. During the past, fiberoptic lines have been cut during building accidents, acts of mischief, or network updates that had bugs that were hard to pull back.
Outages are reported by local governments
A number of local officials said that AT&T's downtime was making their services less reliable.
In a statement Thursday morning, the Department of Emergency Management for San Francisco said that its 911 center was still working. However, many AT&T users were unable to call the emergency line because of the failure. It told people to call 911 from a landline or get someone with a competing service to do it for them.
"We know of a problem that keeps AT&T wireless customers from making or receiving calls, even to 911," the department wrote in its post. "We are involved and keeping an eye on this."
The Upper Arlington, Ohio, Fire Department said that the AT&T outage was making its fire sirens not work. People in St. Joseph County, Michigan, were told to use Wi-Fi to call 911 if they couldn't reach them through AT&T's network. Cobb County, Georgia, said that the downtime did not affect its 911 services, but customers may want to find other ways to get in touch with emergency services. The county government in Cabel County, West Virginia, said that people who couldn't call 911 could text 911 as a last option.
CNN was told by people from the New York Police Department that they couldn't use their AT&T phones to make calls or check their emails Thursday morning unless they were connected to Wi-Fi.
T-Mobile and Verizon say they're not impacted.
The DownDetector website also shows that about 1,000 power losses were reported by Verizon and T-Mobile users Thursday morning.
In a response, T-Mobile said, "We did not experience an off-line." "Our network is working as it should."
Verizon said the same thing, saying that AT&T's outage didn't effect them.
Verizon told CNN in a statement that their network is working properly. "Some customers had trouble this morning calling or texting other customers who use a different carrier." We are still keeping an eye on things.
A T-Mobile slowdown was reported by users on Downdetector, the company said. These reports "likely reflect problems our customers were having trying to connect to users on other networks."
"Real-time status information for over 12,000 services across 47 websites representing 47 countries," the website says about Downdetector.
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