By Wesley Harris
AT&T’s network went down for many of its cellphone customers across the United States Thursday morning, leaving customers unable to place calls, text, or access the internet.
Many Lincoln Parish residents took to social media Thursday morning to complain that the lack of cell phone service was disrupting their day.
Several law enforcement agencies contacted by the Lincoln Parish Journal said despite the widespread cell service interruptions, the ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911 remained unaffected.
The Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness informed parish homeland security offices of a nationwide cellular outage, primarily affecting communications with AT&T carriers. The issue, described as a routing problem rather than a hardware issue, led to sporadic but widespread service disruptions, including Louisiana and multiple other states. AT&T is actively working on resolving the situation, though a timeline for restoration has not been provided.
National media sources reported Thursday morning that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were investigating to determine whether the AT&T outages are the result of a cyberattack, a hack, or a technical malfunction.
AT&T acknowledged that it has a widespread outage but did not provide a reason for the system failure.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said early Thursday. “Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”
While some Verizon and T-Mobile customers reported outages, they appeared far less widespread. T-Mobile and Verizon said their networks were unaffected by AT&T’s service outage and customers reporting outages may have been unable to reach customers who use AT&T.
Technical experts said Wi-Fi can be used to make calls when in the range of a Wi-Fi hotspot. You can enable Wi-Fi calling on android devices by visiting this page: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/2811843?hl=en. For iPhone users, please see this page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108066
A Lafayette TV station reported a cut in a cable in southwest Louisiana has added to the outages.
