AT&T’s network was impacted by a cellular outage in the U.S. Thursday morning, impacting thousands of wireless customers across the country, according to the outage tracking site Downdetector.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said in a statement to NBC News. “We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”
It’s unclear how many customers have been affected or what led to the service disruption. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon customers began reporting issues with their services around 3 a.m. ET Thursday. There also appeared to be network issues Cricket, Consumer Cellular, Boost Mobile and other regional services, according to Downdetector.
However, a spokesman for Verizon told NBC News that they don’t see any issues on their network and believes the problem is with other carriers. Verizon customers are only having issues when trying to call a number that is associated with one of the impacted carriers.
T-Mobile also said their networks were operating “normally,” and explained the outages reported in Downdetector is likely “reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
Several police departments around the country reported difficulties communicating with city phones. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina said customers were “briefly unable to contact 911” during the outage.