Cellphone carrier AT&T is experiencing a massive outage, as the top carriers are seeing mass reports of service outages, according to data from Downdetector.
At approximately 3:35 a.m. on Thursday, top carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon began experiencing an abnormally high number of outage reports. The outages reported also affected Mint Mobile, Cricket Wireless, TracFone, U.S. Cellular, Boost Mobile, and other smaller providers. Many smaller carriers share phone towers or are subsidiaries of a larger provider.
One possible cause of the mass incident is an “intentional malicious hack,” Lee McKnight, associate professor of iSchool at Syracuse University, told the Associated Press. “But the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental.”
Just a few hours later, at around 8 a.m., a number of other companies that are not cellphone carriers started experiencing an uptick in reports. Wells Fargo, Spotify, Starlink, Samsung, Gmail, and many others saw a large increase in reported outages; however, it is unknown whether these outages are related.
“The widespread nature of the outages could indicate a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack on core Internet infrastructure namely the Domain Name System, as has happened before, most famously in 2016,” McKnight told the Washington Examiner.
“A major cloud service provider such as AWS or Azure experiencing an outage at one of their data centers is possible but less likely to be the cause in my opinion,” he said. “The first usual suspect remains human error/cloud misconfiguration.”
Between 8:50 a.m. and 9:05 a.m., AT&T customers alone accounted for 73,972 outage reports, according to Downdetector. The site lists Houston, Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Miami, and Indianapolis as the locations most affected by the outages.
Hundreds of people voiced their concerns by posting in various threads on Downdetector.
“06790 zip code we just got bommed idk what to do or where to go but there’s no way to communicate,” one user wrote on the AT&T thread.
Verizon and T-Mobile have both asserted that their networks are not down, and suggested that the reports may be coming from when their users are attempting to connect with someone using another provider.
“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
T-Mobile said, “Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
In the T-Mobile and Verizon threads on Downdetector, dozens posted to report that their service is actually up and running.
Customers experiencing the outage saw SOS messages displayed on their cellphone status bar, indicating the device is not connected to their provider’s network. AT&T told its customers to connect to Wi-Fi in order to make calls, a feature that can be turned on in many iPhones and Android phones.
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“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” AT&T said.
If a customer does not have the Wi-Fi calling feature available to them, but they do have access to Wi-Fi, they can download a Voice over Internet Protocol application like WhatsApp to make phone calls while AT&T works to restore service.
