Residents of the United States woke this morning to find widespread outages in cellular service, with AT&T bearing the brunt of a seemingly nationwide issue.

Problems with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile services began flooding into outage site Down Detector at roughly 0400 Eastern (0100 Pacific) and haven't slowed since, with more than 73,000 AT&T outage reports submitted at the time of writing. T-Mobile and Verizon, the other two major cell network operators in the US, have also seen widespread outage reports, but far fewer in number than AT&T. 

"T-Mobile did not experience an outage. Our network is operating normally," a T-Mobile spokesperson told The Register. "Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks." 

Verizon had much the same to say, telling us that its network is operating normally, and the issues likely relate to Verizon customers trying to reach those on other carriers. With most of the reports pertaining to AT&T, and T-Mobile and Verizon's denials of anything wrong on their end, the outage appears to be an AT&T issue, which the carrier has confirmed.

"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning.  We are working urgently to restore service to them," an AT&T spokesperson told us. "We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored."

No explanation for the outage, which is ongoing as of publication, was given. 

The outage is severe enough that affected AT&T customers appear to be unable to place or receive any phone calls, including to 911, the San Francisco Fire Department warned customers on Twitter.

"If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline," the SFFD said - but "do not call or text 911 simply to test your phone service," the Fire Department added. 

A map of AT&T outage reports shows several major metropolitan areas are affected at the time of publication, including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. 

Cellular towers have classically been owned by the carriers, but that's changed in the US in recent years - most towers are now owned by tower real estate investment trusts like American Tower and Crown Castle, who've bought up tens of thousands of cell towers. Many of those towers were purchased from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, making even the largest US cellular providers look more like the small virtual network operators their hardware has classically supported. 

With that in mind, we reached out to some of the major cell tower firms to see if they had anything to report. We'll update this story if we hear back, and as the situation evolves. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/02/22/americans_wake_to_widespread_cellular/