Mississippi

Mississippi Bears Brunt of Cellular Outages from Winter Storm

Winter Storm Fern knocked out 10% of the Magnolia State’s cellular capacity; minimal outages across 10 other states were reported to the FCC

Eric Urbach

Jan 26, 2026 — 1 min read

Photo of generators at an AT&T disaster recovery staging area in Waco, Texas, from the company

WASHINGTON, Jan 26, 2026 – In addition to incapacitating transportation services across much of the country, Winter Storm Fern is also knocking out telecom services.

Mississippi reported that 10 percent of its cellular service was currently offline, according to a Federal Communications Commission outage report released Monday. That’s a 6.1 percent increase from Sunday.

Several counties in Mississippi including Alcorn, Benton, Carroll, Choctaw, Lafayette, Leflore, Panola, and Prentiss and Pontotoc saw outages more than 30 percent, with Alcorn at more than 40 percent outage and Humphryes and Sharkey counties at more than 50 percent outage.