(Reuters)

A cellular outage on Thursday hit thousands of AT&T users in the United States, disrupting calls and text messages as well as emergency services in major cities including San Francisco.

More than 73,000 incidents were reported around 8:15 a.m. ET, according to data from outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

AT&T said some of its customers were facing interruptions and it was “working urgently” to restore service. “We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored,” it said.

The AT&T outage has impacted people’s ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911, a post on social media platform X from the San Francisco Fire Department said.

“We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911),” the fire department said on the platform.

Downdetector showed users of Verizon, T-Mobile and UScellular also faced disruptions.

(Reporting by Nilutpal Timsina, Harshita Mary Varghese and Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Anil D’Silva and Arun Koyyur)