Nationwide AT&T Cellphone Outage Preventing Some Emergency Calls – When Will It End?

A widespread outage is affecting major cellular carriers and Internet providers across the nation on Thursday morning.

Customers from New York to Dallas to San Francisco are reporting major service interruptions for AT&T, with Verizon and T-Mobile also suffering service issues, according to NBC News and CNN.

According to service tracking site DownDetector, AT&T customers reported increasing issues, with a peak outages of nearly 75,000, early Thursday. Numbers were leveling off at around 9 a.m. ET., per the site.

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said in a statement obtained by NBC News. “We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”

In an update around 11:30 a.m. ET, AT&T said they had restored service to about 75% of impacted customers.

"Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers," they said, per NBC News.

Just after 3:00 p.m., the company announced service had been resorted.

It was not immediately clear what triggered the service disruption.

Customers of the affected cellphone companies are reporting phones displaying “SOS,” meaning the phone can still access emergency services.

AT&T has reported sporadic outages over the last week, with a temporary 911 outage in the southeastern U.S., CNN reported.

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The Massachusetts State Police also urged people not to call 911 just to see if the number worked.

"Many 911 centers in the state are getting flooded w/ calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cell phone," they wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Please do not do this."

“If you can successfully place a non-emergency call to another number via your cell service then your 911 service will also work,” they added.

Verizon, which had more than 4,000 outages on Thursday, said in a statement that they are “continuing to monitor the situation” but that their network “is operating normally,” per NBC News.

“Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier,” the company said. 

T-Mobile also said that their network was operating as it should. “Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” the company said, per the outlet.

The outage issue may be linked to “peering,” or how cellular services hand off calls from one network to the other, per CNN.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are assisting the Federal Communications Commission with its investigation into the cause of the outage.