Is There a Widespread SMS Outage Affecting 2FA?

SMS and telephony often face issues due to various factors, like your local carrier or the service provider. It might also depend on the nearest antenna to your location. Keep an eye on those as they could be contributing to the problems you're facing.

Depending on your location, you might want to check out status.twilio.com as a starting point for potential SMS disruptions. It's a reliable resource for figuring out whether there's an ongoing issue.

I've had problems with my Microsoft account for a few days where the authenticator data is missing, and I'm unable to get SMS or calls to my registered number.

These kinds of SMS problems usually arise from specific services, carriers, or inter-carrier links. It's a good idea to search for any correlations across various services or forums that might have real-time updates. Services often provide health check pages, but just be aware that not all of them are accurate during outages.

Yes, there are reports of SMS issues affecting multiple organizations this morning. It seems like several providers are impacted, not just one. The first thing you should do is check the status page for your SMS provider—Twilio, AWS SNS, Sinch, and Vonage all have their own status pages. If those show everything is green, then the issue might be with A2P 10DLC filtering, which is when carriers aggressively filter messages, making it look like there's an outage when there actually isn’t. If you're only having issues with one carrier, that could point to a registration issue. For your elderly customers, consider setting up a backup option like having them receive OTPs via phone call instead.