NEW YORK — A nationwide issue with AT&T cellular coverage impacted customers' ability to call or receive calls from numbers on different carriers.
There was a large spike in reports of customers having issues on outage tracking website Down Detector around 1 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. In replies to customers on social media, AT&T support said the issue was impacting calls between carriers, and "carriers are working as quickly as possible to diagnose and resolve."
The Federal Communications Commission issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon saying it was aware of reports that consumers in "multiple states are unable to make wireless calls" and that there is an ongoing investigation.
This was déjà vu for some customers: In February, AT&T suffered a massive nationwide outage to its U.S. cellphone network because of a technical error, leaving thousands of people without any service for about 12 hours.
Customers have experienced several major outages from cell carriers and social media sites this year. Just one week ago, Verizon customers experienced an hours-long outage, with many saying their phones registered no service and they were unable to make calls or send messages. In March, a massive Meta outage affected Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp users.
In a separate incident in March, AT&T acknowledged that customer data was found on the “dark web." The dataset contained information such as Social Security numbers for about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier; in addition to passcodes and Social Security numbers, it may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.