HOUSTON — AT&T customers across Houston and other parts of Texas reported widespread internet disruptions on Labor Day, with nearly 1,700 outage reports logged shortly after midday Monday, according to DownDetector.
The outage tracker recorded a sharp increase in reports shortly after noon, followed by another spike around 1 p.m. Nearly 1,300 reports also came in around 2:17 a.m., indicating that customers experienced problems earlier in the day.
Houston recorded the largest concentration of reported outages, followed by Spring, Dallas, Fort Worth, Cypress and Austin.
More than 40% of the reports involved 5G home internet, while broadband internet accounted for 28% and WiFi-related problems made up 24%, according to DownDetector.
AT&T customers turned to social media to report service problems and seek answers from the company.
Harris County Justice of the Peace Lincoln Goodwin said his AT&T fiber service in the Houston area had experienced slow internet and problems connecting to Google applications since Sunday.
“Can one of you please explain the problems in the Houston area with very slow internet/no service related to Google applications over AT&T fiber?” Goodwin wrote on X.
Google, Gmail, YouTube, Fortnite and the Xbox Network also recorded increases in user-reported outages during the period.
AT&T’s help account on X received numerous complaints from customers seeking information about the disruptions.
The company’s outage information indicated that some fiber-related problems could take 10 to 41 hours to resolve, while some internet outages could take up to 13 hours. One customer in Liberty reported an estimated repair time of 29 hours.
AT&T had not publicly identified the cause of Monday’s widespread disruptions at the time of the reports.
The incident marked the company’s second known widespread outage in two years. In 2024, AT&T attributed a major cellphone service disruption to an incorrect process used during a network expansion and said the incident did not result from a cyberattack.
AT&T has not said whether the latest outages resulted from a similar issue.
The company has also faced reports of service disruptions alongside other major carriers. Last month, Verizon and T-Mobile acknowledged widespread connectivity reports, with T-Mobile saying some customers experienced problems when attempting to reach people using rival networks.
