A nationwide AT&T outage is affecting some customers on Tuesday. The company stated that a problem is preventing many AT&T customers from completing calls between carriers, which also means that customers from a rival service cannot place calls to an AT&T customer. However, calls between AT&T customers are still going through, with internet access remaining unaffected. Some subscribers complained on social media about their service being disrupted completely.
According to a company spokesperson, the carriers are working as quickly as possible to diagnose and resolve the issue. The number of impacted customers was not shared by AT&T, but reports of issues using the service spiked starting around 1 pm ET. The numbers continued to climb in the following hours but started to decline by 6 pm ET, as per Down Detector. Cities like New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis had the most reports of issues.
Due to the interoperability problem, thousands of Verizon customers also reported a service outage on Down Detector on Tuesday. Despite some locations, such as Camden County, Georgia, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, issuing alerts about 911 calls being disrupted during the outage, AT&T assured CNN that 911 calls were going through. The alerts were accidental, triggered by a template for such notifications.
This outage occurred less than four months after a massive disruption that knocked out service for AT&T’s network for nearly 12 hours, rendering tens of thousands of customers unable to make phone calls, send texts, reach emergency services, or access the internet. In March, AT&T disclosed that it had been hacked in a separate incident, resulting in the theft of data like account holders’ Social Security numbers. The story has been updated with more context and developments.