AT&T Wireless customers in San Francisco are in a froth after the network’s wireless data services went offline Friday afternoon.
Reports started appearing on Twitter with the hashtag #attfail starting around 2pm Pacific time. Customers reported having voice service and several bars of signal strength, but no internet connectivity.
Wired tests confirmed that AT&T’s internet service was out from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., and continues to be offline as of this writing. Attempts to use internet services were met with the error message, “Could not activate cellular data network.”
Visual voicemail also appeared to be unavailable, but SMS text messaging was working normally as of 5pm Pacific.
AT&T has suffered numerous intermittent connectivity problems thanks in large part to the popularity of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. The combination of unlimited internet plus a web-friendly phone means that people with iPhones use them for internet browsing far more than users of other smartphones do, studies have shown (and Wired.com’s traffic logs confirm). Also, some applications, such as the live video streaming built into the Major League Baseball app, use large amounts of data bandwidth. These problems have led AT&T to add capacity; the company has also recently floated the idea of providing “incentives” to limit the heaviest users.
“We are seeing a hardware issue in downtown San Francisco that is causing some degradation in service. GSM and Edge voice and data services are still accessible. Our experts are aware and working to resolve it as quickly as possible,” said Fletcher Cook, a spokesperson for AT&T.
Cook wouldn’t comment on when AT&T first noticed the problem, or when it would be fixed. “Our priority is to resolve it as quickly as possible, and then we will focus on what happened.”
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