Cellular outages from AT&T, Cricket Wireless reported nationwide
Thousands of Americans are dealing with cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers Thursday, according to data from Downdetector.
AP file
A number of Americans are dealing with cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers, according to data from Downdetector.
AT&T had more than 73,000 outages as of 8:30 a.m. in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The outages began about 2:30 a.m. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country's largest.
Cricket Wireless, which is owned by AT&T, had more than 13,000, the outage tracking website said Thursday.
“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 and Cricket said in a statement.
Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications issued a statement about the outages Thursday morning.
"OEMC is aware of the issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving calls (including to 911). We are monitoring the situation closely and taking appropriate action," OEMC said.
"The 911 center is still operational. Please do not call 911 to simply test your service. If you are an AT&T customer and unable get through to 911, try calling from a landline OR try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 911 on your behalf."
Cricket Wireless had more than 13,000, the outage tracking website said Thursday. Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,900 outages. Boost Mobile had about 700 outages.
“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.
T-Mobile said that it 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,” T-Mobile said.
Some iPhone users have seen SOS messages displayed in the status bar on their cellphones. The message indicates that the device is having trouble connecting to their cellular provider's network, but it can make emergency calls through other carrier networks, according to Apple Support.
So far, no reason has been given for the outages.