According to Montgomery County Police, “The nationwide cellular service outage that affected several major service carriers and impacted phone calls has been restored. Please do not call 911 to test your phone line. Only call 911 for emergencies.”
AT&T’s network was down for many of its customers across the country, including locally here in the DC Metropolitan Area on Thursday, February 22. The outage prevented customers from making/receiving calls, sending/receiving texts, or accessing the internet without WiFi. Other phone services appeared to have similar outages Thursday morning, but the spike was mainly seen in AT&T service, according to several news sources online.
Alert Montgomery sent out the following notice: “There are reports of cascading cellular service outages among major telecommunication provider such as: AT&T, Consumer Cellular, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon. The reported outage has also affected FirstNet. If you need to contact 9-1-1 for emergency services, please utilize a landline. Text to 9-1-1 is not impacted.”