The breaking developments at this hour on this massive outage
today cell phones across this country 10s of thousands of
AT&T customers.
Their phones not working. Other carriers affected by this too.
Tonight sources just telling ABC News they now believe it
was an AT&T software update that brought the phones down.
The outages rippling across the country.
You can see the map there showing the most affected
cities including Los Angeles,
Houston, Chicago and Miami. AT&T tonight saying service has been
restored but for many hours some users were told if
you have an emergency call on a landline but what
about the many Americans who no longer have a landline
And authorities are now asking tonight was this sort of
a wake up call.
If the threat had been worse,
Rebecca Jarvis leading us off tonight.
Tonight, multiple federal agencies, including the FBI and the FCC
are investigating after AT&T customers in major cities all over
the country from LA to Dallas to Chicago,
lost cell service. I woke up around 3:00 and I
checked my phone and it said SOS only.
The outage affected emergency services in multiple states with callers
having problems getting through to 911 San Francisco's fire department
telling callers having issues to use a landline.
Massachusetts State Police reporting their 911 call centers flooded with
calls from people trying to see if 911 works from
their cell phone.
Please do not do this.
It also affected Firstnet, a nationwide network for first responder
and police communication.
AT&T hasn't said exactly how many of its more than
100 million customers were affected.
According to the website Down Detector,
which tracks self reported outages,
the numbers peaked around 10:00 AM at more than 70,000.
But that's just cases reported directly to the website.
Down Detector also reported outages from T-Mobile and Verizon,
but both those companies say they're operating normally and blame
the reports on failed calls from their customers to AT&T
users.
So let's get right to Rebecca Jarvis with us tonight.
Rebecca sources telling us that this was a software update
that malfunctioned,
affecting 10s of thousands, perhaps even more.
And all of these concerns today because people were told
to use landlines if there's an emergency,
concerns that this could have been far worse in this
country,
particularly because so many people don't.
Have a landline anymore?
That's right, David. And far worse,
potentially, if it had been a cyber attack or something
more malicious,
it was also a reminder that in an emergency,
most phones like this one have a function where you
can use Wi-Fi to make an emergency call.
And you could use that SOS emergency function to also
text in a real emergency,
David. All right, Rebecca Jarvis leading us off here tonight.
Rebecca, great reminder.