AT&T resolves cellular phone outage for tens of thousands of customers

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating a cell phone outage that affected tens of thousands of AT&T customers Thursday morning.

By 2 p.m., less than 5,000 customers were affected by the outage.

“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future,” a company statement said.

Prince William County reported outages had been resolved by 11 a.m. on Thursday and the county was receiving 911 calls as normal.

However, a county alert warned residents that “residual issues with wireless service connectivity may impact your ability to place any calls from your cell phone, including to 9-1-1.” Residents were advised to use WiFi Calling if they are an AT&T customer, or a landline telephone until cellular service was fully restored.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were also looking into what caused the outage, according to National Security spokesman John Kirby. They were working with partners in the tech industry to “see what we can do from a federal perspective to lend a hand to their investigative efforts to figure out what happened here.”

“The bottom line is we don’t have all the answers to that. I mean, this just happened earlier today. And so we’re working very hard to see if we can get to the ground truth of exactly what happened,” Kirby said.