Hurricane Helene has led to widespread cellular outages across several Southeastern US states.

The category 4 hurricane, which has claimed more than 100 lives and produced wind speeds of 140mph, has battered Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia since reaching land late last week.

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Verizon and the other carriers are currently working to restore connectivity. – Verizon

PowerOutage.us reports that more than two million people are still without power across the impacted areas. South Carolina, with 748,681 customers, is the worst affected, followed by Georgia (572,261), North Carolina (458,567), Florida (130,043), and Virginia (99,019).

Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia have also logged sizeable outages.

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have all dispatched their engineer teams and deployed their respective disaster recovery response units to the impacted areas.

The hurricane has led to fiber cuts and extensive damage to cell towers.

AT&T noted yesterday (September 29) that it has received more than 100 requests for emergency connectivity support across the affected states.

"So far, this has been one of the largest mobilizations of our disaster recovery assets for emergency connectivity support," said AT&T in a statement.

Verizon and T-Mobile both reported damage to fiber cables. As of yesterday, Verizon said it had deployed more than 20 mobile satellite assets to provide temporary connection to cellular towers to get them back on air while waiting for permanent fiber restoration to be completed.

The carrier has also said that it will waive postpaid domestic call/text/data usage from September 26 until October 5.

Telcos in the US regularly hold test events to prepare for natural disasters such as hurricanes.

Earlier this year, DCD attended a hurricane simulation held by Verizon and the Military, aimed to test new technology and practice drills such as fiber splicing in hazmat suits.

Prolonged power outages have also hindered the telcos' response to restoring network services. Reuters reported that the hurricane has knocked out service to more than 5.2 million people.