This story has been updated.
Bexar County’s courts, a local hospital system and public safety entities were among San Antonio-area agencies warning about disruptions caused by a statewide Spectrum outage affecting internet and phone services for customers on Tuesday afternoon.
“If you have phone service provided by SPECTRUM, you will not be able to call 911,” the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office said via social media. “A tower in Houston was impacted due to the storm and affecting internet service in the region.”
As of 6:08 p.m., Bexar County Public Information Officer Monica Ramos said that 911 calls were being received “from all but those with voiceover IP systems with Spectrum phone systems,” which is “just a small number of people with these.
“Anyone calling in from a cellphone can get through to 911,” she said.
Spectrum attributed the failure of services across Texas cities beginning shortly after noon to “a third-party infrastructure issue caused by the impact of Hurricane Beryl,” which reached the Texas coast early Monday.
The internet service provider apologized for the disruptions in a post on X at around 3 p.m.
“Texas customers–We apologize for the outage affecting your Spectrum services, and thank you for your patience as our technicians continue to work to restore your services as quickly as possible,” the post said.
University Health, an academic medical center with two hospitals and a network of outpatient centers serving San Antonio, issued an emergency message urging individuals to contact their health care team through MyChart if they were unable to reach University Health by phone.
“This issue is due to a national Spectrum internet outage. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the hospital system added.
Bexar County’s court and judicial activities were also affected by the disruption, and as of 3:04 p.m., the “presiding civil district court was only able to accommodate walk-in requests.”
“The entire courthouse complex is down. Phones, too,” Ramos said.
Spectrum has not released the scope of the outage in Texas, but the City of Kyle posted that city facilities were affected, along with customers in the Austin area reporting outages on a Reddit thread.
According to Downdetector, a site that monitors disruptions to vital services through user-submitted reports, more than 31,000 reports of Spectrum outages were submitted at around 1 p.m. Areas where the most issues were reported included San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Louisville, Oklahoma City, Round Rock, New Braunfels and Plugerville.
Shari Biediger contributed to this report.
