Mississippi Bears Brunt of Cellular Outages from Winter Storm

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.

In a statement, AT&T said that the company was beginning to see restoration progress across the country as commercial power returns. The company has also deployed backup power generators, and said that all major network facilities remain online, some with backup power. 

Across Mississippi, 261 sites across are currently being run on backup power, according to the report. 

Tennessee also saw a 6.1 percent increase in outages since yesterday, noting that 6.7 percent of cell towers are currently down across the state. In the state, 121 towers are currently running on backup power.

From Alabama to New York, 10 other states also reported cell service outages. Issues were much less widespread. 

Only 1.7 percent of all cellular sites in the reported outage area are currently offline, according to the report. No 911 service outages were reported to the FCC.