AT&T cellular outage in United States disrupts vital services

A cellular outage early on Thursday hit thousands of AT&T users in the United States, disrupting calls and text messages as well as emergency services in major cities including San Francisco.

More than 73,000 incidents were reported around 8:15 a.m. ET, according to data from outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said in a statement to CNBC. “We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”

The AT&T outage has impacted people’s ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911, a post on social media platform X from the San Francisco Fire Department said.

“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the fire department said on the platform.

Downdetector showed users of Verizon, T-Mobile and UScellular also faced disruptions.

T-Mobile said it did not experience an outage and that its network was operating normally.

“Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” the company said in an emailed statement.

A Verizon spokesman reached by CNBC said there was no issue with the Verizon network and their customers are only impacted if they try to reach out to the carrier experiencing the problem.

He did not provide information on what the issue could be with the other carrier and did not name the other carrier.

– CNBC’s Steven Kopack contributed to this report.