AT&T outage leaves Chicagoans without service

The big picture: AT&T's network suffered the most widespread outages. Self-reported AT&T outages surged in the early hours Thursday, reaching more than 73,000 reports across the U.S. just after 8:30am ET, according to the tracking site Downdetector.

• Chicago is among the biggest cities affected, along with Houston and Atlanta.

What they're saying: "We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored," AT&T said in a statement to Axios.

Zoom in: Roughly 1,500 AT&T outages were reported in Chicago as of mid-morning Thursday, per Downdetector.

• Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications says it's monitoring the outage and that the 911 center is still operational.
• "Please do not call 911 to simply test your service," OEMC said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages Thursday, but at a much lower scale than AT&T.

• More than 4,000 Verizon customers had reported outages across the U.S. just before 8am ET Thursday, per Downdetector.

What we're watching: No reason has been given for the outages.