AT&T iPhone owners suffering from connectivity issues on LTE

AT&T has confirmed reports of outages across its network in the U.S., and has instructed users to restart their devices to restore connectivity.

Reports had been circulating since 6:00 p.m. Eastern time regarding potential outages. At the time, device restarts weren't sufficient to restore connectivity.

AT&T confirmed the outage to AppleInsider just before 9:00 p.m. The carrier advised users to restart devices — but social media reports suggest that it may not rectify the issue in every case.

Thanks for reaching out and making sure we're aware of your wireless service issues. If you're currently experiencing issue when making wireless calls, please restart your device - that should resolve the issue. Thanks for your patience & understanding. We're here for you! ^NdyE
— AT&T (@ATT) November 16, 2017

Follow-on advice issued by AT&T suggests that multiple resets may be required to restore service.

If you've experienced an issue when making wireless calls, please restart your device, this might be required multiple times- that should resolve the issue.
— AT&T (@ATT) November 16, 2017

Wi-Fi calling is unaffected by the outage, AppleInsider has also learned that older iPhones limited to 3G networks are also unaffected. Outages do not appear to be limited to any geographical area.

25 Comments

pk22901 153 comments · 21 Years

About 7 years ago

I restarted twice.

My first restart was with wifi connected. Fail.

I turned off wifi. My second restart worked.

magman1979 1301 comments · 11 Years

Has anyone looked at the stats on DownDetector? Looks like it wasn't just AT&T that had something happen...

At almost EXACTLY the same time, Google, Verizon, Cricket Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, Yahoo, US Cellular, all seem to have spiked! AT&T was the worst hit, but something tells me this wasn't isolated to them...

Google Drive seems to have had the WORST outage reports so far on that service reporter!

radarthekat 3902 comments · 12 Years

Is this only iPhones? AT&T and others (see Magman’s comment, above) owes an explanation as to what they did to create this iPhone-specific situation.

Mike Wuerthele 6901 comments · 8 Years

radarthekat said:

Is this only iPhones? AT&T and others (see Magman’s comment, above) owes an explanation as to what they did to create this iPhone-specific situation.

According to our data, iPhones seem the most profoundly affected, but I'm not sure yet if that's an anomaly of the locations affected or some other factor.

coachbonk 3 comments · 7 Years

Ok. Just got off the phone with AppleCare. Here is the fix:

1. Go to Settings -> Cellular -> Cellular Data Options -> Enable LTE
2. Change to “Data only”

That’s it.