Nationwide cellphone outage impacts AT&T users

Overnight Thursday and into the morning, a nationwide cellphone outage affected an untold number of AT&T customers, preventing users from calling, texting, or accessing the internet. The outage impacted some 9-1-1 capabilities, though it does not appear to have been the case here in the Mat-Su. The outage also appears to have impacted T-Mobile and Cricket to a lesser extent.

According to a statement from AT&T, as of Thursday afternoon, service had been restored to all customers.

“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again.”

The cellphone company also said that the outage to its network appears to have been the result of a technical error, not a cyberattack, as some on social media had theorized.

“Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve,” the company wrote on its website.

The carrier is the country’s largest, with more than 240 million subscribers. During the outage, some AT&T iPhone users saw SOS messages displayed in the status bar on their cellphones, indicating that the device is having trouble connecting to their cell provider’s network. During that period, AT&T had recommended that users utilize Wi-Fi calling and said that emergency calls could be made through other carrier networks.