Bexar County’s courts, a local hospital system, and public safety institutions were among San Antonio-area authorities warning about interruptions caused by a nationwide Spectrum outage that impacted subscribers’ internet and phone services on Tuesday afternoon.
“If you have phone service provided by SPECTRUM, you will not be able to call 911,” the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office stated on Twitter.
As of 6:08 p.m., Bexar County Public Information Officer Monica Ramos said that 911 calls were coming in “from all but those with voiceover IP systems with Spectrum phone systems,” which is “just a small number of people.” Anyone calling from a smartphone may reach 911, she added.
Spectrum blamed the loss of services in Texas cities beginning just after noon to “a third-party infrastructure issue caused by the impact of Hurricane Beryl,” which hit the Texas coast early Monday morning. The internet service company apologized for the difficulties in a post on X at 3 p.m.
“Texas customers—We regret the interruption affecting your Spectrum services and appreciate your patience as our staff strive to restore them as soon as possible,” the post stated. University Health, an academic medical facility with two hospitals and a network of outpatient services that serves San Antonio, sent an emergency warning asking consumers to call their healthcare team.
“This is due to a nationwide Spectrum internet outage. We apologize for any trouble this may create,” the hospital institution stated. The outage also disrupted Bexar County’s court and judicial functions; as of 3:04 p.m., the “presiding civil district court was only able to accommodate walk-in requests.”
“The whole courthouse complex is down. Phones, too,” Ramos explained. Spectrum has not disclosed the magnitude of the outage in Texas, however the public of Kyle confirmed that public services were affected, and users in the Austin region reported problems on a Reddit thread. According to Downdetector, a website that monitors interruptions to critical services via user-provided complaints, over 31,000 claims of Spectrum outages were filed about 1 p.m.