AT&T outage in Arizona likely to stretch to a third day

AT&T cellular services are currently down in the city of Tucson in Arizona. The network apparently went down yesterday and is expected to stay offline until at least one more day has passed. AT&T’s outage map isn’t showing any active problems in the area however.

An AT&T user reported the issue and visited a store in the area to inquire about the problem. They were told that the towers had been taken off the network to be improved. Now this is actually not an uncommon occurrence: cellular companies often need to do this to upgrade their services.

The process usually involves replacing the components on cell towers. These components are often then sold off to other countries for a heavily discounted price. So while some users — especially those who live in urban areas — might never have encountered this before it’s nothing to be alarmed about.



I do think that AT&T should have mentioned something on the outage map or notified users in the area in advance. Especially in today’s political climate where some people might unnecessarily become concerned about something much more sinister taking place.

Affected AT&T users in Tucson, Arizona should hopefully be seeing an improvement in either call quality, network bandwidth or both from tomorrow or the day after. If someone in the area has often had their calls drop regularly then that should be improved too. Though I doubt there were any major problems on the AT&T network in a large population center like Tucson.

Improving the network is one of the good things that AT&T is taking part in nowadays. AT&T soured relations with veteran employees recently by making a major shift in business strategy that is worse for both the company’s representatives and its customers.

Other than that AT&T employees received short paychecks last month which is obviously a big problem. Especially because apparently no one across multiple HR departments in the company knew why this had happened. The new business strategy also has AT&T salespeople knocking on doors, where at least one instance likely involved a representative that lied.

AT&T and the other major U.S. cellular companies need all the goodwill they can garner and improving the network in a big city is one way to go about it. Let’s hope it’s a tangible improvement for AT&T users in the area.