Mass AT&T Outage Across The U.S. Ends After Several Hours

ACROSS AMERICA — AT&T customers across the United States were sent into a frenzy Thursday morning and afternoon as a mass network outage interrupted service for many, though service has since been restored.

The outage had cleared as of around 3:10 p.m. Eastern Time, AT&T said in a statement.

"We sincerely apologize to [our customers]," the company said. "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."

The outage began at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time, and AT&T had more than 73,000 outages as of 9:30 a.m. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country’s largest.

Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported massive outages Thursday morning, though not as severe, according to DownDetector.

The most reported outage locations as of Thursday morning were in Houston, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, New York City, and Austin.

Several local police departments took to social media to advise locals who need to call 911 to use a landline if possible.

Some departments, like Tulsa Police, said that if you cannot reach 911, try turning on Wi-Fi calling or texting 911.

"Many 911 centers in the state are getting flooded with calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cell phone," Massachusetts State Police said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Please do not do this. If you can successfully place a non-emergency call to another number via your cell service then your 911 service will also work."

Lee McKnight —an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University and an affiliate of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism — theorized that the most likely cause of the outages is "a cloud misconfiguration, which is a fancy word for saying human error."

McKnight continued: "A possible but far less likely outcome is an intentional malicious hack of ATT's network, but the diffuse pattern of outages across the country suggests something more fundamental."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.