Massive Cellphone Outage Hits Four Major Carriers in Southeast
Officials were still trying on Wednesday to figure out what caused a massive cellphone outage that knocked out service to customers in the Southeast on the AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon networks Tuesday. A fiber cable was reported to have…
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been cut in western Kentucky along the Tennessee/Kentucky border, said Buddy Rogers, Kentucky Emergency Management public information officer. He didn't have any other specifics about the circumstances but said emergency services providers and other officials remained in contact through the Department of Military Affairs' radio communications system -- which is a statewide two-way radio system -- satellite radio/phones and other communications systems and devices. No issues were reported to the state emergency operations center in Kentucky while services were being restored, nor were there any requests for state-provided resources, Rogers said. Sprint and Verizon tweeted about the issue as it was happening, updating customers about what was going on. Sprint said the issue was caused by a local exchange provider, and both Verizon and Sprint said they were aware of a connection issue in Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee that engineers were working to resolve. A Sprint spokesperson said services had been restored Wednesday. An AT&T spokeswoman said wireless and wireline service was restored for all customers in parts of the Southeast affected by a "hardware-related network issue." Neither Verizon nor T-Mobile commented. The Jeffersontown Police Department in Kentucky posted on its Facebook page that the 911 systems were down and gave an alternate number to call for help. A few hours later, it said 911 lines were back in service.