According to data from Downdetector, many Americans are dealing with cell phone outages from AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers.
At around 9:30 a.m. ET, AT&T reported more than 73,000 outages in Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and other locations. The power outage began around 3:30 a.m. ET. The company's subscriber count is the largest in the country, exceeding 240 million.
Cricket Wireless, owned by AT&T, had more than 13,000 outages, the fault tracking website said Thursday.
“Some customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service. We recommend using Wi-Fi calling until service is restored. ” AT&T and Cricket said in a statement.
Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,800 outages. Boost Mobile experienced approximately 700 failures.
“Verizon's network is operating normally. This morning, some customers were experiencing issues when calling or texting customers served by another carrier. “We continue to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
T-Mobile said there were no outages.
“Our network is operating normally. Down Detector may reflect challenges our customers were having trying to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said. I am.
Some iPhone users have seen an SOS message appear on their phone's status bar. According to Apple Support, this message indicates that your device can't connect to your carrier's network, but you can still make emergency calls through other carriers' networks.
So far, the reason for the power outage has not been revealed. But Lee McKnight, an associate professor at Syracuse University's iSchool, believes the most likely cause of the outage is cloud misconfiguration, or human error.
“While a far less likely outcome could be a deliberate malicious hack of ATT's network, the widespread pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental. McKnight said in an emailed statement.
