AT&T's Nationwide Wireless Outage Impacts Business Users, Consumers
Customers relying on one of the largest carriers in the country were struck by a widespread wireless service outage Wednesday.
Consumers and businesses took to Twitter to report that there was no cellular service, rendering mobile phones unable to place or receive calls for hours.
AT&T Wednesday night acknowledged the nationwide LTE issue, tweeting from its @ATTCares handle: "Currently there is an outage affecting wireless services in your area. Please know that technicians are working to restore your services at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and we appreciate your patience while we restore your services."
At the same time, the telecom giant suggested that users restart their mobile devices repeatedly as a possible fix. The outage, which impacted both iPhone users and other mobile devices, has since been largely resolved, but some users are still experiencing issues, according to website DownDetector.com Thursday morning.
Dallas-based AT&T said in a statement, "Our network is performing normally after an issue yesterday that affected some users' ability to make certain wireless calls. Users were able to resolve the issue on their device."
AT&T has not yet revealed the root cause of the service outage, but the issue appears to be connected to its LTE network. Users making calls over Wi-Fi were not impacted.
One AT&T solution provider who asked not to be identified said the outage yesterday only affected voice calls made over LTE, and the solution provider focuses on mobile data services for its business customers.
"As a result, we didn't have many users affected by the outage," an executive for the organization confirmed.
Rickie Richey, CEO of Altaworx, an AT&T Platinum partner that focuses on wireless and IoT solutions, said that it hasn't received any service tickets from its AT&T Mobility clients.
"Most of our mobility business is on the AT&T Control Center IoT service, which is on the Cisco/Jasper platform and doesn't use the AT&T core voice network," Richey said.