T-Mobile said early Tuesday morning (around 1 a.m. ET) that it finally fixed network issues that had caused intermittent voice and text outages for most of Monday and affected customers across the U.S.
The outages, which started June 15 just after 12 p.m. ET and continued for about 13 hours, were an “IP traffic related issue” that “created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day,” according to an update around midnight from T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert.
“I can assure you that we have hundreds of our engineers and vendor partner staff working to resolve this issue and our team will be working through the night as needed to get the network fully operational,” Sievert continued.
At that point, some progress had been made and Sievert warned it could still take several hours before customers’ phone calling and texting capabilities were fully recovered, though the problem was resolved about an hour later.
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Complaints and reports of outages showed up on social media Monday afternoon, and a surge in network issue reports could be observed on the crowd-sourced website Downdetector. T-Mobile’s President of Technology Neville Ray first confirmed the carrier was having an issue via Twitter yesterday afternoon.
While voice and texting were down, Sievert said data services were working throughout the day, so customers could use apps and services like FaceTime, iMessage, Google Meet, Zoom, and Skype to reach people.
Still, the duration of the T-Mobile’s outage was not insignificant. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the outage “unacceptable” and said the agency is launching an investigation.
The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable. The @FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers—and so are American consumers.
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) June 16, 2020
There were complaints that AT&T and Verizon customers were also experiencing problems with service, but both carriers confirmed Monday that their respective networks were working normally. A Verizon spokesperson at the time said it was aware another carrier was having network issues and “calls to and from that carrier may receive an error message.”