Editor's Note: Tell us if and how these outages affected you! Poll at the bottom of this story.
UPDATE: 2:35 p.m.:
AT&T spokesperson Kirstin Carroll said, “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,” in a statement emailed to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Thursday afternoon.
UPDATE: 11:32 a.m.:
A North Little Rock Police spokesperson said that agency had not had any issues.
UPDATE: 11:24 a.m.:
Kristin Knox, spokesperson for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office, said they weren’t experiencing any problems as of 11:15 a.m.
Knox also said they have received questions about their dial to 911 feature.
“If you have service, then yes, of course, we will receive your text to 911 in the unincorporated areas,” she said. “But, of course, if you do not have cell phone service, then no, we're not going to receive that because it won't transmit through. But we're telling everybody, you can still reach us through social media messaging if you can't actually dial out. But we are ok over here. We're still receiving calls and rocking and rolling.”
UPDATE: 11:15 a.m.:
Little Rock spokesperson Aaron Sadler said the city's office phone network wasn't experiencing issues as a result of the AT&T outage. The city's cell phone network provider is Verizon, and its telephone network provider is Windstream.
He also said the city initially provided the wrong non-emergency police phone number. The correct number is (501) 371-4829.
UPDATE: 9:56 a.m.:
A spokesperson for Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, the company that provides ambulance services to Little Rock and North Little Rock, said it wasn’t having any issues.
“All our phones come in through like a landline fiber,” said Ralph Loszak. “So we don't have any issues related to it."
UPDATE: 9:41 a.m.:
Cindy Murphy, spokeswoman for the Arkansas State Police, said in a text Thursday morning that state police and the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management were not experiencing issues in connection with the AT&T outage.
UPDATE | 9:01 a.m.:
A City of Little Rock press release reported that 911 callers in Little Rock and North Little Rock and "elsewhere" are having trouble reaching emergency services this morning due to "a widespread AT&T cellular outage."
According to the release, the outage appears to be primarily affecting those with AT&T cellular service, and those experiencing cellular issues have reported having difficulty making or receiving phone calls, including those to emergency services in Central Arkansas.
The City of Little Rock has provided the following telephone numbers for those in need of assistance during the outage, but are still encouraging those in emergency situations to call 911:
Little Rock: (501) 371-4829
North Little Rock: (501) 340-5446
Other areas of Pulaski County: (501) 340-6963
A news release from the Faulkner County sheriff's office said phones in their dispatch center were working.
The agency encouraged county residents unable to call for emergency services on cell phones or landlines to contact the sheriff's office via social media, email or their website.
7.56 a.m. | Nationwide cellular outages impacting Arkansas customers on AT&T, Cricket Wireless and other providers:
A number of Americans are dealing with cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers, according to data from Downdetector.
AT&T had more than 64,000 outages this morning, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. AT&T customers in Arkansas have also reported outages. The outages began at approximately 2:30 a.m. The carrier has more than 240 million subscribers, the country's largest.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” AT&T said in a statement.
Cricket Wireless had more than 13,000, the outage tracking website said Thursday. Verizon had more than 4,000 outages and T-Mobile had more than 1,900 outages. Boost Mobile had about 700 outages.
“Verizon’s network is operating normally. Some customers experienced issues this morning when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Verizon said.
T-Mobile said that it did not experience an outage.
“Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks,” T-Mobile said.
So far, no reason has been given for the outages.