Subscribers of four major carriers in the United States, namely AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, have reported network problems in the southeastern region of the country.
Customers are finding difficulties in accessing voice and data services in the area. Down Detector, a website that tracks the real-time status of different kinds of services in terms of outages, reveals that subscribers from the four networks are experiencing difficulties with their connections in states such as Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee.
The carriers have released responses to their subscribers regarding the issues that they were experiencing, with the companies stating that they are working on the problem to be able to restore the interrupted services as quickly as possible.
"We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to restore service," said AT&T in a statement to tech news website Re/code.
The cause of the issue was not immediately clear, with speculations stating that the service outage was due to a cut cable or something similar to have caused such a widespread effect that affected all four major carriers in the United States.
However, a representative from Sprint brought a bit of light to the issue, suggesting that the service interruptions may have been caused by a local provider.
The representative from Sprint said that the company was aware of the affected services that customers are experiencing in the region, and not just those that are subscribed to Sprint but also from other carriers.
The Sprint representative then adds that the cause of the problems appears to be a local exchange provider, with the company's network team already working with the said provider to be able to restore the service to its affected customers.
A representative for Verizon also said that it is working with a vendor for the connectivity issue, and at about 8:00 p.m. ET, the company said that it has restored its service to the affected customers.
AT&T spokesman Jim Greer also said through an e-mail to the Washington Post that repairs have been completed on hardware-related issues and that services should now be back to normal.
There is currently no timetable on when the affected services will be restored by the other carriers, as well as no official release regarding the cause of the issue. There is also no released figure on how many customers were affected by the service outage.
Photo: Tim Parkinson | Flickr
