A nationwide cellphone service outage that happened early Thursday morning was restored hours after it impacted calls and texts to local emergency and public safety agencies, including 911.
It appeared the outage was caused by a disruption on AT&T's network, and the company acknowledged an outage with the following statement: "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."
The service was fully restored by Thursday afternoon.
Representatives of Verizon and T-Mobile told NBC Bay Area their networks showed no outage, and customers were having issues only when they are trying to connect with a provider that was experiencing an outage.
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San Francisco's Department of Emergency Management responded to the outage early Thursday morning, saying in part if residents are unable to get through to 911 from their cellphones, they should try using a landline.
Almost all agencies sent the following message: "Do not call or text 911 to simply test your phone service."
NBC Bay Area also reached out to BART Thursday because it had to stop trains for about 10 minutes to reset its computers. A spokesperson said they haven’t been able to confirm yet if it was related to the AT&T outage and it’ll take some time to determine the root cause.
Local
Here's the full statment from San Francisco's DEM posted on social media:
"We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911). We are actively engaged and monitoring this. The San Francisco 911 center is still operational. If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline.
"If that is not an option then please try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 911 on your behalf.
"Do not call or text 911 to simply test your phone service."
