AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile customers saw service disruptions Tuesday afternoon when towers were being worked on in the area. Over 2,000 people reported AT&T outages to the website DownDetector.com, while 133 people reported Verizon outages. The AT&T outage affected both wireless and wireline connections, and when originally contacted, AT&T said they were aware of the issue, but had yet to determine the cause. WRCB reported a statement from AT&T, “Some customers across parts of the Southeast are experiencing wireline and wireless service issues. Engineers have pinpointed a hardware-related issue and are working to restore service as quickly as possible. We apologize for this inconvenience.” A Verizon representative said they expected service restoration shortly after 7:30 pm Tuesday evening. But what caused the problem? Some news outlets are reporting that it was a problem with AT&T’s landline network that caused outages for all the wireless carriers. In addition to Tennessee, some customers saw service outages in Alabama, Kentucky, and Indiana. According to Re/code, AT&T is the dominant landline provider for the region so all major cellular providers use its networks for backhaul.
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