Update – AT&T service restored for most of Tampa and Sarasota areas

Good news for you AT&T customers in the Tampa Bay area: You should be back online soon.

“Service has been restored for a vast majority of AT&T wireless customers in the Tampa and Sarasota areas of Florida affected by a local service provider issue,” AT&T spokeswoman Karen McAllister said in a statement issued at 10:45 a.m. “A limited number of areas in the Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles, California,  markets served by the same provider were also affected. Our engineers coordinated with the local service provider to help expedite restoration efforts and we’ll continue to closely monitor the situation until it’s fully resolved. We apologize for this inconvenience.”

Services in the Tampa Bay area went down earlier on Friday “due to a local service provider issue,” the company said.

The outage is occurring at the same time that a new cable provider – Frontier – is taking over half a million cable and landline users, replacing Verizon FIOS.

There were concerns going into late Thursday night and Friday morning that those Verizon FIOS customers would have a disruption in service. That’s what happened when Frontier acquired AT&T’s Internet, TV and lifeline services in Connecticut in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times reported this week.