A nationwide outage at wireless carrier AT&T has prompted users across the U.S. to call 911 as dispatchers report widespread disruptions.

The blackout apparently began on Tuesday afternoon, when there was a spike in reports around 6 and 9 p.m., according to Down Detector, a website that monitors power outages.

The states that appear to be hardest hit so far are California, Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida and Georgia – but more and more states are reporting problems, Nick Sotor said.

According to The Mobile Report, AT&T attributed the problem to a critical error at one of its switching centers, which resulted in a series of problems – including service delays and a complete loss of network connectivity.

The problem mainly affects iPhone users and has even emergency services affected, with officials in Seminole County, Florida urgent People with a problem should contact the non-emergency hotline.

A nationwide AT&T outage has prompted users across the United States to call 911 as dispatchers report widespread outages

Many customers have since contacted X to express their frustration over the hours-long outage and seek answers from the phone company.

“Nice of AT&T to have a nationwide cell outage without the public knowing,” wrote one user.

“Thousands are wondering why they are in SOS mode when there is no outage in their area. Some ridiculous company gets hacked, then there is a massive nationwide outage and the attacks just keep coming,” he said, calling on the Federal Communications Commission to take action.

“AT&T is getting on my nerves with all these outages. There is no reason I can’t be out and about and my phone is saying SOS. What the heck,” wrote another.

Many AT&T customers have turned to X to express their frustration

One customer even called on the federal government to take action

When customers were lucky enough to reach AT&T support, the company acknowledged that there had been an outage but offered little in the way of reassurances.

There is currently no workaround and the company has not provided an estimated timeline for when the issue might be resolved.

What makes matters worse is that most of the company’s senior technical support staff have finished their shift for the day – and the issue remains unresolved, according to The Mobile Report’s report.

Nevertheless, AT&T officials say they are working to fix the problem, which they say only affects a “limited number of our customers.”

“We are working to resolve a software issue that may impact the connection of a limited number of our customers to our wireless network,” a spokesperson told DailyMail.com.

“Keeping our customers connected is our top priority, so we thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”

At around 11:20 p.m. EST, a company spokesperson contacted DailyMail.com with an update on the situation.

“We have fixed a software issue that was making it difficult for a limited number of our customers to connect to our wireless network,” a spokesperson said.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank our customers for their patience while we worked to resolve this issue.”

The outage occurred on the same day that the FCC announced that AT&T would have to pay a $950,000 fine for failing to notify call centers about a similar outage in 2023 that affected police stations in Illinois, Kansas, Texas and Wisconsin.