T-Mobile confirms weekend disruption, cites strong demand

T-Mobile USA acknowledged that its website and in-store computer systems were briefly out of commission this past Saturday, and the carrier cited demand from customers as the culprit, though it did not provide a specific explanation of what caused the system failures.

The outage occurred on Saturday, and was first spotted by the blog TMoNews, which said the company's website and in-store sales systems were down for the "better part of a day." The outage is notable because the carrier recently introduced new rate plans and also recently started selling new high-end smartphones like the HTC One.

"We would like to thank our customers for their patience," T-Mobile said in a statement to FierceWireless. "While it was great to be in demand, we want to apologize that some of the systems that support our customers in stores, online and through customer service were temporarily unavailable at times on Saturday. Our wireless network was fully operational during this period. Again, we thank our customers for their patience."

A T-Mobile spokesman declined to elaborate on the reason behind the website and sales system disruption. The carrier has said it has seen increased traffic at its stores since it started selling Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) LTE-capable iPhone 5 on April 12.

T-Mobile CMO Mike Sievert described first-day sales of the iPhone 5 as "gangbusters," according to AllThingsD. "We experienced lines out the door this morning at nearly all of our almost 3,000 stores nationwide."

For more:
- see this TMoNews article

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