AT&T Wireless Outage Resolved; Fairfax Customers Can Now Call 9-1-1

FAIRFAX, VA — Fairfax County government alerted residents around 2:44 p.m. on Thursday that the nationwide disruption of AT&T wireless service had been resolved. Customers were advised to reboot their phones in order to resume using their wireless service.

The disruption, which started early Thursday morning and continued for more than eight hours, prevented the Fairfax County 911 center to receive calls from AT&T wireless customers. The county advised those affected by the disruption to use a landline to contact emergency services.

Fairfax County government sent out the following alert at 6:20 a.m. Thursday:

There is currently a reported nationwide AT&T outage that is preventing wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 9-1-1). The Fairfax County 911 center is still operational. If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 9-1-1, please try calling from a landline. If that is not an option, try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 9-1-1 on your behalf.

"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning," AT&T said in a statement. "We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored."

The outages began at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time, and AT&T had more than 73,000 outages as of 9:30 a.m. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country’s largest.

Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported massive outages Thursday morning, though not as severe, according to DownDetector.
The most reported outage locations as of Thursday morning are in Houston, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, New York City, and Austin.

Related: Mass AT&T Outage Impacting Customers Across The U.S.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.