AT&T confirms recent cellular outage

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

An AT&T spokesman confirmed that several towers and cell sites were knocked offline in the Youngstown area Wednesday.

Jim Kimberly, a Chicago-based spokesman for the communications company, said AT&T had not yet found the cause of the outage, but he did say that it led to “degraded service” for some area customers most of Wednesday. He did not know how many customers were affected.

The company’s technicians and engineers were able to resolve the problem by 2:30 p.m. that day. Kimberly said the outage is not common, and the incident was confined to sites in and around Youngstown.

Nick Scupillo, manager of the Verizon store on Boardman-Poland Road, said he was aware the sites were down. He said, at times, both Verizon and AT&T share towers, but each company maintains its own mobile signal.

Scupillo said two of his customers had problems with their phones as a result of the outage, but sales associates were able to resolve those issues quickly.

Kimberly said not all AT&T customers were affected. The company reported that those who did experience issues with their service were using several different phone models.

AT&T anticipates no further service interruption as a result of Wednesday’s outage, and the company did not receive any complaints before that time, Kimberly added.