Tens of thousands of people nationwide, including some in San Francisco, were affected by an AT&T service outage Thursday morning, hamstringing their ability to make calls and send text messages for hours.
As many as around 74,000 AT&T customers reported losing service, peaking between 5 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., according to Down Detector.
An AT&T spokesperson, who characterized the problems as “wireless service interruptions,” told The Examiner shortly after 12:15 p.m. that all service on the network had been restored.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” the representative said. “We sincerely apologize to them. 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.”
According to Down Detector’s heat map, San Francisco was one of a handful of cities affected by the outage, though not as severely as other metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York City.
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A San Francisco Department of Emergency Management spokesperson told The Examiner that the agency is aware of the problems and that The City’s 911 center is still “operational.”
The spokesperson advised that residents experiencing emergencies who have lost cell signal either enable Wi-Fi calling on their phones or use landlines — though only 34% of homes in The City own the latter, according to 2022 data from Hire A Helper. If neither solution is an option, officials recommended asking friends or family members who use different carriers to call 911 on their behalf.
"This outage highlights that as we move away from landlines and copper lines, we’ll need a much more resilient network to ensure access to public safety," the spokesperson said.
AT&T is the largest cellular carrier in the U.S. The company said in its most recent quarterly earnings report it had 241.5 million mobile subscribers.
It’s unclear what caused the service disruption. The Federal Communications Commission told multiple outlets that it's investigating the outage.
