AT&T reports wireless service should be restored to its users

After a nationwide outage Thursday that affected millions of customers, AT&T reports that all customers should have their cell phones restored. The company sent this statement late Thursday afternoon:

“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 ABC News, federal agencies are looking into this nationwide issue. Investigators are trying to determine if the outage is a result of a cyber attack, a hack, or simply a technical malfunction.

Sharon Manista of Parma Heights is an AT&T customer. This morning, Manista had service on her phone, but her children did not.

"I woke up to my daughter trying to get a hold of me earlier in the day and her phone was out; my phone was working fine," said Manista. "It's kind of a scary thing when you think about it, so hopefully, it won't go out for long periods of time."

At Parma Heights Police, the phone lines never went down. That's because the department is prepared for an outage like this by using two wireless providers.

"I did talk with the person who runs our IT, our detective bureau sergeant. He said that he had checked this morning and we were still functioning well this morning. But, we have that just as a backup in case something like this were to happen, and it did directly affect us. We were able to roll to that backup system so that our 24/7/365 operations can keep going," said Detective Eric Taylor, Parma Heights Police.

With most phones back up and running, many are still curious why some phones went down and others didn't.

"Talking though about this eclipse coming too, and you wonder, will that have any effect on anything? You know everything is solar, all the towers and all that stuff," said Manista.

Just after 6 p.m. Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, NOAA, GOES-16 SUVI Instrument captured a solar flare. The space weather prediction center said it does not believe the flare has anything to do with the cell phone outages.

"I looked up some of the numbers, how powerful any ejection has been in the last 48 hours or so, nothing really to write home about. Not to that level," said Jay Reynolds, Research Astronomer at Cleveland State University.

Reynolds continued, "I would say AT&T is probably better protected than what any solar flare at this point can do."

The outage put a halt to many businesses' day-to-day tasks.

"The impact of this isn't just on making a personal call to a loved one or child to check on them, but I think many business owners rely heavily on this, and it's not only just small business owners folks that work for larger companies," said Michael Goldberg, Associate Professor, Department of Design and Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Business, Case Western Reserve University.

Manista said without her landline at home, a disconnection like Thursday's really makes you think, "especially all that's going on in the world today, like I said, I if you can't get a hold of the most important people in your life. You're counting on that for your livelihood pretty much nowadays," said Manista.

First reports out outages early Thursday morning

Around 5 a.m., News 5 started seeing alerts about phones out across Northeast Ohio. The City of Mentor posted that all calls and texts to emergency and non-emergency lines are not going through.

This outage not only impacted calls and texts, but also FirstNet 911 services.

FirstNet provides our nation's emergency communicators with a secure, reliable broadband connection to communicate with both the public and first responders.

AT&T posted on their website they were working hard to fix the issue and apologized for any inconvenience.