The Sun recently emitted two major solar flares, but officials at NOAA said the flares do not seem to have caused Thursday’s nationwide outage of cellular service.
Solar flares are explosions of energy that occur on the Sun’s surface, often appearing as localized bursts of bright light. Although the energy they emit can disrupt technology on Earth and in orbit, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction said the recent flares and outage are unrelated.
“While solar flares can affect communication systems, radar, and the Global Positioning System, based on the intensity of the eruption and associated phenomena, it is highly unlikely that these flares contributed to the widely reported cellular network outages,” they said.
According to NOAA, one of the recent solar flares peaked at 6:07 p.m. ET Wednesday, while the other peaked at 1:32 a.m. ET Thursday. Both were ranked 3, or Strong, out of 5 on NOAA’s Radio Blackout scale.
SEE THE MASSIVE SOLAR FLARES THE SUN SPIT OUT THIS WEEK
Many Americans woke up Thursday morning with no service on their cellphones. FOX Business reported that outages for AT&T customers, in particular, began about 3:30 a.m. ET, citing Downdetector. The number of outages grew to more than 73,000 customers by about 9 a.m. ET.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T said in a statement released at 10:15 a.m. ET. “Our network teams took immediate action and so far three-quarters of our network has been restored. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service to remaining customers.”
The number of AT&T customer outages dropped to just over 4,000 by 2 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector.
Other cellular providers stated that they were not affected by the outage.
“Verizon’s network remains fully operational. Some customers may have experienced issues this morning when calling or texting those served by another carrier. Our network continues to function normally,” said Verizon in a statement Thursday.
LARGEST SOLAR FLARE IN 6 YEARS LEADS TO PROBLEMS WITH RADIO COMMUNICATIONS WITH PLANES
“We 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,” said T-Mobile in a statement Thursday.
AT&T is the nation’s largest cellular service provider, making up about 46.9% of the market share, according to Statista. Verizon comes in second at 28.6% of the market, and T-Mobile comes in third with 23.5%.