AT&T mobile traffic dropped 10 percent in some cities during Facebook outage

AT&T saw notable drops in mobile traffic in major cities when Facebook and its popular Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps went offline for hours during a massive global outage. In two cities, mobile traffic declines hit double digits – 11 percent in New York City and 10.6 percent in Houston – on October 4 during the six-hour period “coinciding with a disruption across several top social media platforms,” AT&T said. Mobile traffic on AT&T’s network in Arkansas and in Miami/South Florida plunged 9.9 percent each, while Chicago was down 9.2 percent during that time. The stats give an indicator of just how much traffic is tied to social media and messaging services. As of the end of June 2021, AT&T had more than 191 million mobility subscribers and connections, including connected devices. Verizon declined to say if the carrier saw a similar network traffic trend during the outage and T-Mobile hasn't shared information about its mobile network usage. Facebook’s platforms are used by individuals as well as businesses, with the number of daily average users across the suite of apps approaching 3 billion.