BALTIMORE — You may have woken up and gone right to your phone to check what is new in the world this morning, but if you were an AT&T customer you may have noticed your signal was out.
Unfortunately, the mobile company is having an issue with their cell phone coverage throughout pockets of the country. Leaving many to rely on WiFi-supported communications.
While the cell service went down a solar flare also just so happened to spark up and send radiation flying towards Earth. And no, the solar flare did not cause the outage for AT&T despite what you may read on social media.
The solar flare event we experienced last night around 1:30 am EST, was focused on the sunlit part of the Earth. So, the radiation was mostly affecting the eastern hemisphere where places like Europe and Western Asia had issues communicating through high-frequency signals.
The western hemisphere was left mostly spared as the radiation was not concentrated towards us.
As of writing this article at 11 am, the Space Weather Prediction Center is showing that there is incoming radiation from a solar flare.
But to fully answer the question of if this caused the cell phone outage, no because cell phones run on a different signal than what the radiation was effecting.
When looking at the electromagnetic spectrum, this is what everything wireless works off of, you will notice that cell phones fall into a category between radio waves and microwaves. It shares more in common with high-frequency radars than it does with your favorite FM radio station.
The solar flare ends up causing ionization of the lower levels of the atmosphere which causes interference for long-range radios. Things that work off this range of waves are ham radios, commercial airlines, and certain military and government agency tools.
Cell phone signals are able to still connect with cell towers that can then transmit the cell signal without interference from the ionized atmosphere (what happens to our atmosphere when the flare makes contact).
So, if you are experiencing an outage on your cell phone make sure to stay connected on to a WiFi connection to call and send out messages or use a landline if you have access to one.
