Over 50,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 7 a.m. ET Thursday, with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to tracking site Downdetector.
AT&T’s network suffered a widespread outages across the country Thursday morning with cellular service and internet down, according to the tracking site Downdetector.
Some Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages, though theirs appeared to be less widespread than AT&T.
Over 32,000 AT&T outages were reported by customers at about 4 a.m. ET Thursday. Reports dipped then spiked again to more than 50,000 around 7 a.m., with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to the site.
That number surged to more than 71,000 just before 8 a.m. ET.
A little over 1,100 T-mobile outages and about 3,000 Verizon outages were reported as of 7 a.m. Thursday.
It’s not clear what triggered the service disruption.
Apparently Verizon and T Mobile are fine, their users were just trying to contact AT&T friends/family and couldn’t so they thought they were having an outage (per the article on The Verge).
Sounds like a John Oliver joke.
BOOM! WHAT NOW BUSINESS DADDY?
I read this in his voice I kid you not hahahaha
As a T-Mobile customer, if I’m affected by this, I’d probably never notice. Signal just disappears randomly on most days whether due to a “local site issue” (their term) or a butterfly flapping its wings between my device and the tower.
You should reset your network settings on your phone. I have T-Mobile and it’s by far the best network I’ve used. If you’re in the deep countryside then you’ll have issues. You shouldn’t be seeing issues like that at all.
I have to reset the network configs about once a month because VoLTE just stops working, and that’s the only fix. I’ve been through FCC complaints, customer service, case manager, etc. There are 3 towers visible from my house, and I can throw a rock and hit one of them.
Sounds like you have other problems but I want to say there’s such a thing as being too close to a tower as well.
That is really strange. I’ve never encountered anything like that.
That was my experience as well. Switched to AT&T which has its own problems but at least it’s consistent. I absolutely hate that AT&T basically has an allow list of phones that reliably work on their network.
As an alternate viewpoint, I had T-Mobile for years, and I couldn’t keep a phone call connected for more than 10 minutes. If I travelled across the metro area (about 600K people), the call would drop 4 times from one side of the city to the other. Since I got on Verizon, it’s been bulletproof. I imagine these things are very location-dependent.
Definitely location dependent. It’s all about who has the better cell tower location(s) and how many are present. Sometimes they don’t overlap enough or they are in a poor location.
I’m a Google Fi member. About a year ago all of our phones (a pixel 5, 7 and 4a 5G) all went from doing their normal thing to having full LTE signal all the time that’s totally useless. Speed tests show it as 100kbps down and maybe 50kbps up. All the time.
Oof. This isn’t good.
This reminded me that I left my phone in the other room and I’m waiting for a phone call. Seriously, thank you.
Well… that phone call never came. Apparently because my phone service isn’t working.
D’oh!
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Just 70k? From Houston to NY? Riiiight.
That’s just the report number. It’s a pretty large report number. During the wireline days, if you got that kind of number the President of the company had to appear in person at the FCC offices within 24 hours to explain it.
afaik, cellular is (still) not obligated to the same service standards as pots.
Not exactly. Mobile service has higher downtime and outages are more localized usually. If a mobile cell goes down, not a big deal on outage report. But, if you have a wireline CO failure, that’s a problem. In addition, there is a difference in user perception, so mobile is less reported.
Over 50,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 7 a.m. ET Thursday, with most issues reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, according to tracking site Downdetector.
Considering the scatter, this doesn’t appear to be a network problem, unless somebody did something really stupid. Magnetic storm?
Edit : Rumor is its a SIM registration issue. But, that doesn’t make too much sense.
I think it’s far more likely to be an attack.
Edit: If it does in fact turn out it’s just AT& T then hanlon’s razor and somebody made a boo boo on change control.
I dunno’, DNS hiccups cause more of an outage than this. If it’s an attack, it’s either a probe that went too far or kiddy’s first ddos script.
If kiddy’s first ddos script can bring half the country’s cell phones down, then I think ATT has some explaining to do.
Oh, I’m sure they would for a serious, in-depth audit. Hopefully this isn’t a Lucille Ball moment.
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If you wanted to attack, you’d be like bin Laden and go after NYC, not Atlanta.
Eric Rudolph has entered the chat
You don’t attack wireless in a town you attack the backbone network. NYC was affected as well.
But now that it seems that only AT&t was affected, change control issues are far more likely
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Social engineering, zero day vulnerabilies, inside operatives. Their security runs tight ships but the towers are on the backbone and unmanned. The hardware isn’t all custom. Vulnerabilities happen. I wouldn’t be shocked if they could. E knocked out by some careful BGP hackery.
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I am affected by the outage. ATT. My phone tells me i’m not registered when i try to make a call. I cant send SMS. On the outage map, it just shows that it is the cell tower that is causing outage.
I won’t go through how you authenticate into a mobile network, but when you can’t your phone is pretty useless. The local cell doesn’t have a thing to do with it.
Idk. Was just reporting my experience. It came back like exactly 12pm CST.
Fixed then! Long outage.
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If a mobile phone is all you have, and you can’t authenticate to the network, you won’t have a way to make a report.
