Americans Reporting Nationwide Cellular Outages Including AT&T, Verizon, And Cricket Wireless
Americans across several states reported service interruptions of their cell phone service, reporting cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless and Verizon.
According to the Associated Press, AT&T had over 73,000 service outages around 9:30am ET across Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Cricket Wireless had over 13,000 outages as of today, with 66% of people reporting they had no signal, DownDetector reports.
"I was down in San Antonio, came back for a couple hours, woke up to it being out again /: this is frustrating..had things to do today," another commented under the report.
AT&T and Cricket provided a statement acknowledging the outages, suggesting the use of wi-fi calling.
"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning," the statement read. "We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored."
Verizon experienced around 4,000 outages and Boost Mobile had around 700.
People reported around 1,800 outages for T-Mobile, but the service provider denied those claims, saying Down Detector may have received unintentional reports on their behalf.
"Our network is operating normally," the phone company said. "Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks."
An associate professor at iSchool at Syracuse University, Lee McKnight, denies the likelihood of a malicious attack, saying he believes the outages may be tied to human error.
"A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of AT&T's network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental," he said in an emailed statement.
