iPhone stuck in SOS mode? Major carriers thrown into chaos as simultaneous outage bites — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile amongst affected networks

5G on iPhone
(Image credit: Apple)

Do you have an iPhone that won't make calls and just shows the SOS logo (or No Service on older iPhones) at the top of the screen? You aren't alone, and it seems that there are plenty of people suffering from the same issue. The good news? It isn't your fault and your iPhone is working as intended.

The bad news? There's a huge outage ongoing that is affecting some of the biggest carriers in the United States and there is no telling when it will be fixed. There's nothing for you to do but wait, which might not be the news that you wanted to hear.

Right now the carriers that seem to be affected include some of the most popular including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Those affected by the outage aren't limited to just one part of the country, either. Thursday morning, AT&T confirmed "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.” The ongoing outage continues to affect multiple networks and even 911 calls.

No calls for you

As our friends at Laptop Mag spotted, people report that they can no longer place calls in New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, and South Carolina with others likely impacted.

Unfortunately, even the best iPhone money can buy can't place calls or use mobile data if the carriers aren't working and that's the situation people currently find themselves in. Our recommendation? Kick back, make sure you're connected to Wi-Fi where possible, and enable Wi-Fi calling if your carrier supports it — assuming that still works you should be able to place calls as normal.

There is no indication of when we can expect this current issue to be fixed, but we can be pretty certain that engineers at all of the affected carriers are already working on restoring service. Hopefully, it won't be too long before everyone is being bombarded by those pesky robocalls and SMS messages once more.

More from iMore

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.