T-Mobile service restored nationwide after outage impacted millions of customers

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Tuesday, June 16, 2020
T-Mobile service restored after nationwide outage
The FCC isn't happy with T-Mobile. This is why the department's chair says it wants to investigate.

T-Mobile customers should have their service back up and running after a nationwide outage of its voice and data network.

The phone carrier's president of technology, Neville Ray, said in a tweet around midnight that voice and text services were restored.

"Thank you for your patience as we fixed the issues. We sincerely apologize for any and all inconveniences," Ray said.

About an hour after the first tweet confirming the outage Monday afternoon, Ray said, "Data services are now available & some calls are completing. Alternate services like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Facetime etc. are available. Thanks for your patience."

The outage not only impacted the company's more than 86 million customers. It also impacted contact with emergency services.

"We were just advised there is a nationwide outage for @TMobile's ability to make 911 calls," a sheriff's office in the Houston, Texas, area tweeted.

The telecommunications company is routinely ranked as the third largest phone carrier in the U.S., commonly behind AT&T and Verizon, which multiple reports stated was also suffering an outage.

A representative with Verizon, however, said reports of an outage are untrue:

"Verizon's network is performing well. We're aware that another carrier is having network issues. Calls to and from that carrier may receive an error message. We understand downdetector is falsely reporting Verizon network issues. Sites such as Downdetector.com utilize limited crowdsourced data drawn from sample social posts which are often statistically insignificant or factually incorrect. A lot of factors can contribute to a false report on a third-party website ... a faulty device, network traffic that slows but doesn't inhibit connections, commercial RF blockers, human error, network issues impacting other carriers and more. These types of sites do not evaluate and confirm the crowd-sourced data that they receive, they simply aggregate it and report it. The result can be faulty reports of network performance interruptions causing wide-spread miscommunication for wireless users."

AT&T echoed Verizon, adding that its services were operating normally:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, called T-Mobile's nationwide troubles unacceptable, adding the FCC will be launching an investigation.

"We're demanding answers --- and so are American consumers," Pai said.

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