Police Beg People to Stop Calling 911 During Nationwide Outage

The Massachusetts State Police is urging people to stop calling 911 from their cellphones unless they have a true emergency.

"Many 911 centers in the state are getting flooded w/ calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cell phone," the Massachusetts State Police posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday morning. "Please do not do this. If you can successfully place a non-emergency call to another number via your cell service then your 911 service will also work."

Many AT&T customers were unable to make phone calls or send text messages on Thursday morning. An SOS symbol was displayed on their phone screens in the place where cell service is typically shown.

"Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning," AT&T said in a statement, according to a report from NC5. "We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored."

Newsweek has reached out to the Massachusetts State Police and AT&T by email for comment.

Outages have impacted AT&T customers over the past several days, CNN reported, but the number of impacted customers grew significantly on Thursday morning. The outages included a 911 outage that impacted customers in parts of the southeastern U.S.

AT&T hasn't offered an explanation as to why the cell service has been impacted, but CNN reported that "the issue appears to be related to how cellular services hand off calls from one network to the next, a process known as peering, according to an industry source who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

Roughly 74,000 AT&T users have reported issues with their cell service according to the Downdetector website, with reports beginning to spike around 4 a.m. on Thursday morning.

Issues with mobile phones were the main reason behind the reports, with 51 percent of users claiming it was a problem. Users reported that they had no signal in 41 percent of complaints, and 8 percent of users complained of mobile internet issues.

Verizon and T-Mobile users also claimed to be impacted, with thousands of customers reporting outages for both services, although AT&T seemed to be the most impacted by the outage.

However, a T-Mobile spokesperson told Newsweek in an email statement that the company didn't experience an outage.

"We did not experience an outage. Our network is operating normally. Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks," the statement said.

AT&T offers an outage map for its customers to check if their area is impacted, but a customer must sign in and verify their identity through a text message, which failed to come through due to the outage when Newsweek attempted to log in.

Update 02/22/2024, 10:55 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.

Update 02/22/2024, 3:04 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from T-Mobile.