Tens of thousands of AT&T customers reported outages early Thursday morning, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks cellular outages.
There were nearly 42,000 reports of outages with AT&T as of 6:51 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22. That number jumped to 74,000 reports by 9:12 a.m.
Several customers on the site said they did not have any service, and that their phone entered “SOS mode,” which can happen when a cellular connection is broken.
The issue appeared to be impacting customers’ ability to send and receive calls and text messages across the U.S. Most of the issues were reported in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Atlanta, according to Downdetector.
On Thursday afternoon, AT&T released a statement that reads: “Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”
Cricket Wireless, which is owned by AT&T, also said on X that “there is a nationwide network incident impacting multiple services.” AT&T did not acknowledge the issue as a network outage.
AT&T outage reports began pouring into Downdetector around 4:20 a.m. on Thursday. After spiking above 74K, the number of reports dropped slightly by about 10 a.m.
Reports of outages with other services, like Verizon and T-Mobile, were also visible on Downdetector Thursday morning -- but in much smaller numbers.
Almost 3,000 outages were reported for Verizon, while fewer than 1,200 were reported with T-Mobile as of about 7 a.m. The two companies said they weren’t experiencing issues, and that their customers could just be having trouble reaching AT&T cellular customers.
In San Francisco, California, police said the outages were preventing people from being able to call 911. The police department wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that anyone experiencing an emergency should call 911 from a landline, or get in touch with someone who has a different carrier to call on their behalf.
At 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, AT&T confirmed that service had been restored to customers. AT&T released the following statement: “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 in the future.”