USA, — A widespread cellular outage in the United States disrupted service for AT&T members on Thursday, Feb. 22, has now been restored for most of their customers.
According to Downdetector, a website that monitors and reports on service interruptions, the outage affected more than 74,000 users across the country.
The platform displayed a chart illustrating the surge in problem reports submitted in the past 24 hours compared to the typical volume of reports by time of day.
The outage impacted various locations across the nation, with the most reported areas including Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio, San Francisco, Atlanta, San Diego, and Honolulu.
Among the most commonly reported issues were mobile phone service disruptions, accounting for 57% of reported problems, followed by users experiencing no signal (35%), and issues specific to mobile services (9%).
AT&T said Thursday that most of the people affected by a nationwide service outage have cell service again, after hours without the ability to place calls, send texts or access the internet without wi-fi.
In an emailed statement, an AT&T spokesperson said about a quarter of affected customers are still without cell service.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning," the spokesperson wrote. "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.”
Downdetector, showed more than 74,000 customers reported issues at the peak of the outage. By noon Eastern, that number had declined to about 60,000 reported outages.
The outages began at approximately 3:30 a.m. ET. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country's largest.
“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.
The cause of the outage was not made public.