Having issues with your voicemail on AT&T? You're not alone.
A voicemail outage has been affecting AT&T customers for weeks now. A thread on AT&T's support forums now has more than 40 pages of customers complaining of the issue, starting on October 9th and going all the way through to today, October 24th.
There are users checking in with the problem from Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, and North Carolina. The issue is affecting both iPhones and Android devices, including those made by Samsung, Google, and Motorola.
AT&T support reps in the thread say that the voicemail problem is being caused by a "vendor server problem." Meanwhile, some AT&T customers have complained about the problem to the FCC, and one of them was contacted by AT&T's office of the president and was told that the issue was "growing" and that they had two options to fix it: wait for the outage to end or have their voicemail box rebuilt, which would delete any existing messages.
Finally, The Verge contacted AT&T about the problem and got the following statement: "A recent software update to some devices may be affecting our customers’ voicemail. We are working with the device manufacturer to issue a patch to resolve this and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."
A voicemail outage of any kind would be a big deal, but the fact that this one has gone on for a couple of weeks now without any resolution is pretty significant. Many people save important messages in their voicemail box to listen to in the future, and so it's unlikely that they'd want to have their mailbox and lose them, meaning they just have to wait for AT&T to get this problem fixed and go without voicemail in the meantime. There's no word on exactly when AT&T might get this problem resolved, but we'll let you know more when we get it.