Does the cell network have a single point of failure which could explain these concurrent outages across carriers? I have a (somewhat crude) mental model of how the internet works, so if this were a nationwide internet outage I would at least have an inkling of whether it was an accidental misconfiguration, bad actor launching an attack, etc. I have no such model for the cell network!
Just got one of those annoying alerts on my phone. Saying “Loccal cell phone carriers are experiencing outages” and an alternative number for 9-1-1 calls.