T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon hit by major outage, halting phone and text service for hundreds of thousands
Cellular provider T-Mobile and other U.S. carriers have been having a very large service outage today, Monday June 15. The service interruptions started around 10amPT/1pm ET. As of 430pm PT, the outage is ongoing.
It's affecting thousands of customers in several states. No evidence of cyberattack, say providers, at this time.
T-Mobile's president of technology said some users are still having problems with calls and texts, and recommended customers using WhatsApp, iMessage and other communications tools instead.
Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly.
— Neville (@NevilleRay) June 15, 2020
From TechCrunch:
In our own tests in New York and Seattle, we found that making calls from a T-Mobile phone would fail almost immediately after placing the call. We also found that the cell service on our phones was intermittent, with bars occasionally dropping to zero or losing access to high-speed data.
In April, Sprint and T-Mobile completed its merger, valued at $26 billion, making the combined cell network the third largest carrier in the United States behind AT&T and Verizon.
Others have reported issues on other networks. When reached, spokespeople for AT&T and Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) said their networks were operating normally. Sprint has not yet responded to a request for comment.
There is no evidence that the outage is caused by a cyberattack. One wire report said Level 3, a major fiber network backbone that cell networks rely on for routing calls and messages, was experiencing an outage, which may have explained the network outages.
But a spokesperson for CenturyLink, which owns Level 3, said that there was no current outage on its network.
Observations and reporting from Twitter, below.
These @TMobile issues bring to mind another huge TWC network blackout in 2014. The cause then was an engineer who basically typed the wrong keys: https://t.co/L2GiIEdNyf https://t.co/99sNZxTJFF
— Drew FitzGerald (@DrewFitzGerald) June 15, 2020
T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T phone calls are failing across the US https://t.co/yBZhIrnyzh pic.twitter.com/D7t6Cyt1VV
— The Verge (@verge) June 15, 2020
T-Mobile's network is suffering a whale of a failure today: https://t.co/jfcn7iZaS6
— Drew FitzGerald (@DrewFitzGerald) June 15, 2020
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