nationwide throughout the United States, widespread cellular outages were reported on Thursday morning following the solar flares. According to The Associated Press, tens of thousands of outages were reported by major cellular carriers such as AT&T, Verzion and T-Mobile.

It remains unclear if the two events are related, but reports of outages appeared to begin around the same time as the solar flares.

some solar scientists have cast doubts on claims that there is a connection between the two events. "Flares only cause radio degradation on the *dayside* of the Earth. As you can see below, the U.S was not affected by the event. So it's just a coincidence!," solar astrophysicist Ryan French at the National Solar Observatory posted on X.

The effects of these flares might continue to be felt for days. In a forecast discussion posted at 7:30 a.m. ET (1230 GMT) on Thursday (Feb. 22), NOAA wrote that an "eruptive filament" was seen exploding from the northwest quadrant of the sun's visible disk on Feb. 21.