Americans reporting nationwide cellular outages from AT&T, Cricket Wireless and other providers

A number of Americans are dealing with cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers, according to data from Downdetector. The website that tracks service outages showed Boston among the hotspots for service interruptions in the United States.

AT&T, who was the hardest hit, is actively working to restore service to all of its customers.

AT&T had more than 58,000 outages around noon ET, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The outages, which began at approximately 3:30 a.m. ET, peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country's largest.

"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. 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,” AT&T and Cricket said in a statement.

Cricket Wireless had more than 13,000, the outage tracking website said Thursday. Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,800 outages. Boost Mobile had about 700 outages.

“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.

T-Mobile said that it did not experience an outage.

“Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said.

Some iPhone users have seen SOS messages displayed in the status bar on their cellphones. The message indicates that the device is having trouble connecting to their cellular provider's network, but it can make emergency calls through other carrier networks, according to Apple Support.

So far, no reason has been given for the outages.

Emergency call centers in some cities and states went down due to the outages. Massachusetts State Police posted on X, formerly Twitter, that some 911 call centers were getting "flooded with calls" from people testing to see if they could successfully place an emergency call. The agency told residents not to place tests calls, saying that if non-emergency calls connect, 911 calls will as well.

State police said in a separate post that they had been in contact with AT&T about the outage and encouraged those without service to use a landline if possible in case of emergency.

The Boston Fire department wrote in a post on X that the city's fire boxes, which have been around since the 1800s, are another way to call for emergency help during service outages. Fire boxes have been used during cell service outages in the past. In 2018, a North End resident used a fire box to alert authorities to a blaze when their cellphone could not place an emergency call.

For those still impacted by the outage, Alexander Wyglinski, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, says that there is a possible workaround.

“A lot of cell phones do Wi-Fi calling. So, as a potential backup, if you are close to a Wi-Fi access point, you may be able to use that if you are affected by the network outage," he said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.

With reporting from The Associated Press.