AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Down Across U.S. – March 31, 2020

att down march 31 2020
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AT&T, Verizon, Tmobile and Sprint began experiencing continued outages across the United States, starting early Tuesday morning, and ongoing as of the time of this writing (1:00pm Pacific Time and 4:00pm Eastern Time, March 31, 2020).

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Verizon’s @Verizon Twitter account is spewing out the usual feel-good PR stuff, but has said nothing about this. Same for T-Mobile and Sprint’s accounts. Likewise, the usual AT&T public-facing announcement outlets, such as Twitter accounts @att and @atthelp, are silent as to what the problem may be, but lots of users are sounding off about the outage, which is affecting both cell and Internet service.

at&t down Tuesday march 31st 2020

Some of the areas hardest hit include Atlanta, Houston, Louisville, St Louis, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, and Fort Lauderdale.

In fact, Florida in general seems to be particularly hard hit.

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att down march 31 2020

One participant at the down detection site DownDetector explained that “All major cell companies seem to have really started messing up and going down around midnight. My Mother has T-Mobile I have sprint and my husband has Verizon. All stopped working one after the other.”

And another explained “Just so you know all Cell Phone Providers went down at the exact same time. ATT, Sprint, TMOBILE, Verizon and all.”

One user even suggested “5G rollout. COVID-19 is the coverup.”

(It’s important to keep a sense of humor during times like this – to be clear, that person was making a joke, not putting forth a conspiracy theory. Although, speaking of conspiracy theories, check out this very real, not-a-conspiracy-theory that we recently wrote about – because it sure reads like one: Microsoft and Others Create ID2020 Alliance to Force Digital ID on All – Perhaps by Vaccine)

Given the paucity of information coming from the providers (read as “none at all”) we don’t yet know what has caused this multi-provider outage, however given that it does seem to be affecting all of them, we can take a couple of guesses. We anticipate that it will either be due to:

Regardless of what is causing it, it does seem that, as some are saying, the Coronavirus has brought out a much more evident sense of “we’re all in this together” of late. Indeed, in that spirit, one user on the DownDetector board, who couldn’t get out onto the Internet, followed up their original post with directions for how to get around the outage. Explains Chris, from San Antonio, Texas:

Just wanted to update everyone. I am working with a MacBook Pro on OSX-Catalina. I did this to get ATT broadband to work again a couple minutes ago:

Open terminal then enter the following command:
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
After that command finishes enter this command:
dscacheutil -flushcache

If you’re running something other than OSX or if you are running windows, sorry I can’t be of help but if you know how to, clear your windows’ computer’s DNS Cache or look up how to do it online/in Windows Help.

So how about you? Are you being impacted by these outages? If so, let us know where you are, and what provider you have.

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