UPDATE: As of 4:50 p.m. CT, AT&T announced it is making progress in restoring services following the explosion in downtown Nashville Friday morning.
AT&T issued the following update regarding the progress being made:
“We continue to make progress in our restoration following this devastating explosion. We are completing our work as quickly and as safely as possible. We are beginning to restore power to the facilities in the building after connecting generators through the walls. We are hopeful this equipment maybe back online in the hours ahead. We worked with the Fire Marshal and local officials to ensure this was done safely.
“We are pleased to report that we have restored much of the mobility services that were affected in the Lexington, Kentucky area. We will continue to bring more areas back online as quickly as possible. In Nashville, we have deployed more than 6 portable cell sites to aid in communication including for restoration teams and first responders. We have additional assets in route for deployment in the region.
“Additionally, we are contributing $100,000 to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation to support area businesses impacted by the recent explosion and to help law enforcement collect information for their ongoing investigation. We are proud to call Nashville home and to be working alongside First Responders and community leaders who are exhibiting the strength of this community.”
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Many AT&T customers have taken to social media to voice their displeasure and inconvenience with the delay in restoring service to many areas affected by an outage caused by an explosion in downtown Nashville on Christmas morning.
AT&T has been responding to customers asking them to please be patient while they work to restore service. On Friday, News 2 reported that AT&T was working to bring in crews from all over the country and additional equipment to get service temporarily restored until service can be permanently restored.
The service outage has affected 911 emergency systems, hospital systems, and has reportedly caused issues with other systems such as ATMs and card readers.
The issues are affecting a broad spectrum of not just AT&T services but also T-Mobile services in several southeast and Midsouth metropolitan areas including telephone, internet, and television service.
“We are in contact with law enforcement & working as quickly as possible to restore service for some customers in Nashville & surrounding areas. This is due to damage to our facilities from the explosion. We appreciate your patience,” AT&T replied to an angry customer on Twitter.
News 2 has reached out to AT&T on Saturday morning for an update and received the following:
Our teams continue to work around the clock on recovery efforts from yesterday morning’s explosion in Nashville. We have two portable cell sites operating in downtown Nashville with numerous additional portable sites being deployed in the Nashville area and in the region.
At our facility, the focus of the restoration continues to be getting power to the equipment in a safe and secure way. Challenges remain, including a fire which reignited overnight and led to the evacuation of the building. Currently, our teams are on site working with safety and structural engineers. They have drilled access holes into the building and are attempting to reconnect power to critical equipment. Technical teams are also working as quickly as possible on rerouting additional services to other facilities in the region to restore service.
We continue to be grateful for the work of first responders as they respond to this event and help protect our team working to restore service for our customers.
We’ll provide additional updates here as our recovery progresses.
AT&T Corporate Communications
