An Oklahoma news station reported a “strong solar flare event” took place just after midnight on Thursday morning and claimed that could be the reason several cellular service companies experienced outages across the country.
“Sadly, we’re entering a solar maximum where we’re going to see more solar storms, solar flares and it’s never happened in this time of human history where we’re relying on technology more than we ever have before,” the KFOR.com meteorologist said.
A “strong solar flare” caused cellular outages affecting AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile customers across the U.S.
pic.twitter.com/UBktAa3K3x— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 22, 2024
British Solar Astrophysicist at the National Solar Observatory Dr. Ryan French countered the theory that the solar flare contributed to the cell network outages, pointing out the flares only cause radio degradation on the “dayside” of Earth.
The U.S. was not in the flare zone at the time of the event, so Dr. French concluded, “it’s just a coincidence.”
Some people are attributing cell network outages (AT&T, Verizon) in the U.S to last night’s X-class #SolarFlare. However, flares only cause radio degradation on the *dayside* of the Earth. As you can see below, the U.S was not affected by the event. So it’s just a coincidence! https://t.co/8EQxLV2qVJ pic.twitter.com/A5kImCmStC
— Dr. Ryan French (@RyanJFrench) February 22, 2024
See a map of the areas impacted by the outages:
All major cellphone carriers are experiencing an #outage, but X is still up. Add that to things I didn’t expect to see in 2024 pic.twitter.com/YPWFE33AhC
— Jared Shapiro (@GetFitWithJared) February 22, 2024
Many people are also speculating the cell outages could have been the result of some type of cyberattack.
