AT&T customers in the US were hit with another outage on Tuesday, just a day after the company was fined nearly $1 million by a government watchdog.
A software glitch caused the service to be down last night, with customers seeing ‘SOS’ on their phones instead of the usual bars. 112 services were also disrupted.
AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly has since said the issue has been resolved, but this is the fifth outage or data breach at the company in 2024.
On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined the company $950,000 for an outage that occurred in August 2023 that left customers unable to call 911.
AT&T customers in the US were hit again by an outage that left them unable to make calls, send text messages or use the internet on their iPhone.
According to the FCC, AT&T failed to notify emergency responders of the outage in a timely manner.
The company, which has 115 million mobile subscribers, has suffered more outages recently than any other mobile carrier, communications expert Harold Feld told DailyMail.com.
This recent outage left AT&T customers in the US unable to make or receive calls, send text messages, or access the internet on their iPhones.
Customers began flooding AT&T’s Help channel on X (formerly Twitter) and the Downdetector site reporting outages around 5:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
They also expressed their frustration on social media about the provider’s recurring technical issues.
“I’m about to switch to another mobile provider because AT&T has been giving me a hard time with all the outages and data breaches,” TawnyT wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The outage lasted for several hours and left customers’ iPhones in satellite SOS emergency mode, meaning they could only make emergency calls via satellite.
However, some government agencies across the country have issued statements saying the outage has or could have affected AT&T customers’ ability to call 911, including in Tennessee, California, Arkansas and Florida.
Feld said it’s too early to say whether this latest outage resulted in preventable damage or deaths, but it’s certainly possible.
“The need for 911 is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So even a disruption that occurs in the early morning hours can disrupt the smooth operation of 911 and result in preventable deaths,” he said.
The outage was not nationwide, but appeared to have a wide geographic reach.
According to Downdetector, the hardest hit cities are Dallas, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York City.
“Our customers expect and deserve reliable connectivity. When service interruptions occur, our team of network experts works to restore service as quickly as possible,” an AT&T spokesperson told DailyMail.com in a written statement.
“We value our customers and keeping them connected is our top priority.”
This week’s FCC fine isn’t AT&T’s first. The carrier was previously fined $5.25 million for two 911 outages that affected more than 15,000 emergency calls in 2017.
Feld says AT&T appears to be experiencing more outages than other wireless carriers, but the number of outages is still very limited.
However, the company has faced major technical issues this year, leaving customers questioning its reliability.
In February, AT&T’s network was down for 11 hours due to an internal error, leaving customers unable to make calls, send text messages or use the internet from their mobile phones.
Just weeks later, in March, a data breach containing personal information of 73 million customers was released on the dark web, raising security concerns.
In June, another outage left some AT&T customers unable to make calls between carriers.
And just last month, a major security breach leaked call and text data from mid- to late 2022 for tens of millions of AT&T customers.
It’s not yet clear whether the FCC will investigate Tuesday’s outage. But Feld believes it will take more than short-term assessments to determine whether AT&T is truly trustworthy.
“The FCC should not just do a short-term review of each individual outage, but should also do long-term reviews to look at the carriers’ history and see if there are patterns of neglect,” he said.