AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile customers in the southeastern United States may be seeing a widespread cellular outage that's preventing them from using voice and data services. Downdetector.com is showing outages in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Indiana for all four carriers.
According to a Sprint representative that spoke to Re/code, the issue is related to a local exchange provider that works with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
"We are aware of the impacts to service in which customers across multiple carriers may be unable to access voice and some data services," the Sprint representative said. "This appears to be an issue caused by a local exchange provider and our network team is working with the provider to restore service to impacted customers as quickly as possible."
Sprint said the company is working on a fix, as did representatives from Verizon and AT&T. AT&T said it's working to restore service, while Verizon said its engineers were working with "vendor partners" to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
It is not clear when service will be restored for affected customers.
Update: According to telecommunications industry sources that spoke to Re/code, the service issues affecting all four carriers have been caused by a problem with AT&T's landline network.
AT&T is the dominant landline provider for the region, and all the major cellular providers use its networks for backhaul -- that is, helping transport the data once it leaves their collection of cellular towers.
AT&T says its engineers have found a hardware-related issue and are aiming to fix it to restore service "as quickly as possible."
Top Rated Comments
teams, they're not idiots and any customer service advisor who thinks so is probably in the wrong job. You cannot do a good job if you're predisposed to that opinion.
Customers don't pay for three course meals when they only receive two courses. Nor do they pay the full-fare for a journey when they were only taken three quarters of the way.
It is a horrible, thankless task dealing with irate customers whose anger has been exacerbated by long phone queues but it would all be avoided if carriers offered an automatic pro-rata refund for any obvious service outage. Whether or not a ~50c refund is worthwhile is a matter of opinion, but it is a matter of fact that the customer should be entitled to it if they so desire.
On the flip side when payment is due for such service, no one from the company really cuts the customer any slack.
It's not difficult, people.