Having Trouble Texting On AT&T? It's Not You, The Network Is Down [UPDATE]

If you're having trouble sending text messages, and you're an AT&T subscriber, it's not your phone, it's your network. Sometime yesterday users in various areas around the country started experiencing a number of network-related issues, though the cause wasn't readily apparent at the time.UPDATE: Per AT&T: "On Thursday afternoon, some wireless customers may have experienced issues with sending or receiving some text messages due to a software issue. Engineers resolved the problem by early evening and service is currently running normally. We apologize for this inconvenience."

Most of the people I text regularly use iMessage, so I haven't been particularly affected. However, one of my friends sent me a message last night to see if I could help troubleshoot their issue. They were getting errors whenever they would send a text message. iMessages and 4G internet service was unaffected. After trying a few things, they found that their messages were actually getting through, despite the error messages.

After checking out AT&T's outage map, it turns out that a large portion of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are all affected, with users reporting similar problems. There are other smaller areas around the US that are also reporting errors, as well. Affected systems appear to be text messages and VoIP phone lines.

Aside from AT&T's outage map, the company has so far not released any statements regarding the cause of the outage. From the size of the area affected, it's not merely a tower or two causing the problem. Hopefully the issue will be resolved soon, as at the time of writing, text messages still appear to be causing errors when sent.