AT&T internet service operating normally after major fiber outage impacting Dallas area, company says

The Dallas-based telecom giant noted that more than 7,000 North Texas families were impacted Monday.

DALLAS — Widespread AT&T service disruptions affecting thousands of customers across the Dallas-Fort Worth area have since been resolved, the company says, and some of those customers may qualify for a bill credit.

Customers across several ZIP codes reported severe outages Monday afternoon due to fiber equipment and cable issues. Problems with fiber cables and equipment can impact internet, television services and some phone services.

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“I called, they told me it was a 13 hour and 21-minute wait to get a call back,” said Tyffany Gregory-Barnes from her home in Providence Village in Denton County.

“We were just dead in the water,” said Terry Snuggs who also lives in Denton County and relies on the internet as a clinical systems engineer for hospitals and their diagnostic imaging equipment. “It’s frustrating, especially when both not only just the home fiber goes down, but when the cellular data, the backup method is going down with it, you know, everything was out. And that that becomes untenable in this day and age.”

“Not having service and having an outage for that long on a holiday just on unacceptable,” said Lisa Hope from her home in Desoto. “But I think the most frustrating thing for me was my inability to actually talk to someone from AT&T,” she said.

By late afternoon Monday, however, AT&T announced that service had been restored. Both Terry Snuggs and Lisa Hope confirmed that after several hours without internet their service did return.

“Internet service in the Dallas area is operating normally following a disruption today,” an AT&T spokesperson said. “Our teams worked quickly to repair the issue. We understand how important these services are and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

According to the spokesperson, AT&T Guarantee will give a bill credit to any customer who had a qualifying outage lasting for 20 minutes or more. For more information, click here.

AT&T said in a post on X Monday that the outage was affecting more than 7,000 families.

Houston was also experiencing many issues, according to AT&T’s outage site.

Outage Tracker Showed Sudden Spike

Data from Downdetector showed a significant jump in customer issue reports throughout the day. Reports first showed a big spike at about 2:18 a.m., followed by a large increase in reports starting at about 10:30 a.m.

By about 2 p.m., reports of problems had climbed to 2,795. A normal baseline for the service is only 59 reports. Reports peaked shortly before 3 p.m. at 5,990, but quickly dropped down. There were still 314 reports shortly before 6 p.m.

Problems lingered, however, for customers like Tyffany Gregory-Barnes in Providence Village. As of 7pm Monday she reported she still did not have internet service, a difficult situation when you are a college professor offering classes online.

“My students get an extra day to turn in work, because I’m supposed to actually be grading papers turned in tomorrow and I don’t have access to them,” she said of the digital marketing and entrepreneurship classes she teaches remotely for Alverno College in Wisconsin.

WFAA has reached out to AT&T for more information on the outages.