A cellular outage early on Thursday hit thousands of AT&T users in the United States, disrupting calls, text messages and emergency services in major cities.
Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T Mobile and Verizon users, Downdetector shows::undefined
I was over at Down Detector’s disqus comments. You’d be surprised how many people were saying that. Some said Russia, others said China. I said, it’s The Spanish Inquisition!
While solar flares can affect communication systems, radar, and the Global Positioning System, based on the intensity of the eruption and associated phenomena, it is highly unlikely that these flares contributed to the widely reported cellular network outages.
Wait - the article you linked clearly says AT&T only, not other services. It also sites an AT&T spokesperson blaming a software upgrade on their network as the cause. So any other outages at other providers would be completely coincidental.