In a significant disruption to the telecommunications industry, a major cellular outage has affected several networks across the United States, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The outage, which started early Thursday morning, has caused widespread disruptions for numerous customers nationwide.

Reports of the outage first emerged from Downdetector, a real-time outage detection platform, which showed significant spikes in outage reports for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. According to the platform, AT&T outage reports peaked at 31,931 around 4:30 am (ET), with more than 800 service outages reported for both Verizon and T-Mobile.

The impact of this outage has been far-reaching, affecting not only individual users but also critical services. Notably, the disruption has led to a crash in 911 services across America, causing serious concerns about public safety.

Cellular network users began reporting the outages starting around 4 a.m., according to data from downdetector.com⁴. The sudden and simultaneous outage across these major carriers is unusual and has raised questions about the cause of the incident.

As of now, the specific cause of the outage remains unknown. Representatives from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have yet to provide detailed information about the cause or the expected duration of the disruption.

This major cellular outage underscores the vulnerability of our increasingly interconnected world, where a single point of failure can have cascading effects across multiple sectors and services. It also raises critical questions about the resilience and reliability of our telecommunications infrastructure.