The carriers still use satellites. I have a hard time believing someone knocked down enough cell towers to cause that level of outage. But then again maybe they did. Of course, the carriers and the government will lie about what caused it, especially if China or someone else did it for the lulz.

Yes they do still use satellites, but that's for longer haul communication not local communication. It's unlikely that a cell phone call from a caller in Cincinnati to another cell phone in Cincinnati would ever hop onto a satellite. Local communications is being affected so I think we can rule out satellites being involved here.

You don't need to physically knock down towers to get this sort of outage. I'm quite certain this was a network configuration change that caused the outage since it affects local and remote services. Some pajeet or DEI shitskin made a mistake and the network traffic is all fucked up now. That effectively is worse than knocking down towers and it could have been for the lulz as well since there is a cyberattack that has taken down Change Healthcare and Optum causing disruption in the healthcare and insurance industries. I think that one isn't for the lulz though. That one seems like (((bad actors))) who work in cubicles, but I don't have any proof of that.

I think you may be surprised by the amount of cellular traffic that traverses terrestrial links.