LOUISVILLE, Ky. — After an hour-long outage Thursday morning, AT&T said all of their customers have service again after a nationwide outage.
Other cellular networks appeared to be having some similar difficulties, but on a smaller scale.
AT&T outage reports began increasing around 4 a.m. Eastern time, according to user-generated reports on Downdetector. Some of the most reported locations include Tampa, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago.
"We sincerely apologize to them," the company posted on it's website. "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."
AT&T said it was a software update that went haywire and caused the service outage.
Louisville outage reports
The outages impacted numerous services across Louisville, including Jefferson County Public Schools. A district spokesperson said the app JCPS uses for bus tracking, Edulog, wasn't working Thursday morning.
As service has been restored, JCPS said the app is working again.
Several emergency services in Louisville and the surrounding area have reported issues due to the outage as well.
Louisville Metro Emergency Services said some residents may have difficulty contacting 911.
"If you need to call 911, first try to locate a landline phone or a phone with an alternate provider," officials said on social media. "If you're unable to do this, try calling while connected to WiFi. Your call may take longer to go through in this mode."
Officials also asked residents not to call 911 to check if their phone's service is still working.
Many other fire and police departments in Kentucky and southern Indiana are also advising residents impacted by the outages to use Wi-Fi to call 911 in the event of an emergency.
Oldham County Emergency Services said their 911 lines are working again after briefly being down due to the nationwide AT&T outage.
Nationwide cell service outages
AT&T has more than 240 million subscribers and is the country's largest cell service provider.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” AT&T said in a statement.
But it wasn't the only carrier experiencing problems on Thursday.
Cricket Wireless had more than 13,000 outages reported, according to Down Detector. Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,900 outages. Boost Mobile had about 700 outages.
Verizon and T-Mobile both said in statements they didn't experience outages.
“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
“Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said.
Customers still appear to have access to "SOS mode," which allows cell phone users without access to regular service to call 911 in an emergency, piggybacking off of other networks nearby to do so.
The outage became a major trend on social media overnight, with users on X (formerly Twitter) flocking to a number of hashtags to discuss the issue. Although #CyberAttack was one of the trending hashtags associated with the outage, there is no indication that an attack was the cause of the outage.
It's unclear when service will be restored to affected customers.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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