Huge cell phone outage is causing chaos in entire US
Topics: News, US News, Phones, Technology
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: PeopleImages/RollingCamera
Topics: News, US News, Phones, Technology
A major phone carrier has faced a nationwide blackout across the United States.
Users on the AT&T network have reported massive disruption to service across the country.
At present it is not clear precisely what has caused the outage.
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The outages have impacted areas as wide ranging as New York, Boston, and Atlanta on the East Coast, moving all the way to Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.
Some outages have even been reported in Montreal in Canada.
A number of police stations have also reported that they had been experiencing difficulties with people calling in to report emergencies.
Many users of AT&T have reported that their phones are only able to make calls to emergency numbers.
The company has reassured customers that it is working 'urgently to restore service'.
A spokesperson for AT&T said: “We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”
T-Mobile and Verizon customers have also reported issues, however representatives have said their networks are currently operating normally.
They suggested that users may be experiencing problems when they attempt to contact someone on another network.
A spokesperson for T-Mobile said: “Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
In a more recent update, a spokesperson for AT&T has said confirmed that the company has located and 'pinpointed' an outage.
The company tweeted: “We don’t have an estimated time frame, but our team is on it.”
AT&T has also issued a public apology for the outage, saying in a statement: “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that is happening and 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 has approximately 250 million customers and is the largest provider in the US.
According to DownDetector, around 70,000 customers have reported experiencing problems with the network.