WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Many South Floridians who have AT&T experienced a lengthy outage Thursday morning.
"I woke up and there's no connection on my phone and I'm trying to meet with a client and I had to leave because I can't communicate at all," Tamara Taylor, an AT&T customer in West Palm Beach, said.
Before the store opened Thursday morning, Taylor and a group of AT&T customers waited outside looking for answers when their cellphone service stopped working.
"I'm an electrician. Every morning I receive a call to let me know where I'm heading for to work and right now I don't even know where I'm going," Dave Cash, another local AT&T customer, said.
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More than 32,000 AT&T outages were reported at about 4 a.m. Thursday. That spiked to more than 71,000 outages at about 8 a.m.
Over 1,000 T-Mobile outages and about 3,000 Verizon outages were reported Thursday morning as well.
"One of the things I heard was a solar X-flare, a major flare, has taken out a lot of services and Wi-Fi and satellites and things like that," Alan Crowetz, the president and CEO of InfoStream, told WPTV. "There's also a lot of talk about a major backbone being cut."
Crowetz, a West Palm Beach cybersecurity expert, said official information about the cause could take some time.
"They're working so hard on the problem that there hasn't been a lot of information shared about what exactly is causing it all," Crowetz said.
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AT&T released the following statement Thursday afternoon regarding 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."
According to AT&T's outage tracker on their website, most of the service in Florida was restored by about 1 p.m.
There is still no official word on the cause of the outages.
"This is a great example of where something could hit us, a cyberattack by another country, a solar flare, whatever it may be," Crowetz said. [It shows] how vulnerable we are from our lives being disrupted by a technology incident."
