MEMPHIS, Tenn. — With the loss of cell service all over the country Thursday, people impacted in the Memphis area were forced to use landlines, social media or whatever they could to get in touch with loved ones.
The Memphis Fire Department (MFD), Shelby County 911, Memphis Police and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office all said they were able to continue responding to calls despite the outage. To do that, they had to rely on radio communication and utilize multiple ways to locate 911 callers.
“Well, it seems like today, the world has stopped,” said Tyra Turner-Cleasant, one of Memphis’ unhappy AT&T customers.
Turner-Cleasant said the only way she could communicate with family during the nearly eight-hour outage was through Facebook video messages.
“I’ve got sisters that have AT&T, and I haven’t been able to get a hold of them,” said Jewel Parker, who is grateful she never lost service to her phone, which is covered by Cricket Wireless.
The Memphis Fire Department said it was just before 3:30 a.m. that AT&T notified them about the outages.
“We started to monitor, do test calls and just monitor the system, the volume, as well as testing the system just to see how many people were able to reach 911 communications at that time,” said MFD Lt. Qwanesha Ward.
Lt. Ward said they saw that 911 calls from AT&T subscribers dropped from their usual 36 percent down to around 25 percent. Memphis Police and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said they were still able to respond to calls, though MPD said officers had to mostly communicate via radio.
“Our first responders and our crews out there, they rely heavily on radio communication,” Lt. Ward said. “And we did not see a disruption in how we dispatched our runs to be able to provide service to the community.”
Carlton Ray with Shelby County 911 said their main challenge was helping to boost certain callers’ signals.
“If the SOS mode didn't work correctly, we were able to try to just hop onto whatever the strongest signal that is available,” he said.
Shelby County 911 also took to Facebook, listing alternative ways to contact 911 as well as suggestions to get phones working again.
All the first responder agencies ABC24 spoke with said most of the methods they have in place worked how they were supposed to, and they don’t see any need to make changes.