Early on Thursday, a cellular outage affected thousands of AT&T users across the United States, disrupting calls, text messages, and even emergency services in major cities like San Francisco.
Around 7:00 a.m. ET, more than 50,000 incidents of disruptions were reported, as indicated by data from Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages.
In addition to AT&T, users of Verizon, T-Mobile, and UScellular also reported experiencing disruptions, according to Downdetector.
T-Mobile clarified that it did not encounter an outage and assured that its network was functioning normally. The company attributed the reported issues on Downdetector to difficulties in connecting to users on other networks.
Despite multiple requests for comment, AT&T had not responded immediately regarding the outage.
The outage hindered individuals' ability to contact emergency services via 911, as highlighted in a post by the San Francisco Fire Department on the social media platform X.
"We are cognizant of a problem affecting AT&T wireless customers, preventing them from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911)," the fire department stated on the platform.
