AT&T Mobility's (NYSE:T) prepaid brand Aio Wireless suffered a service outage Monday night but said that by Tuesday morning it had fixed the issue.
According to Aio's Twitter account, the company first reported at 11:22 p.m. Eastern Time Monday that it was experiencing a service outage and told customers it would work to restore service. Around four hours later the company said it had "identified the issue and we are working to restore service for Aio customers who have experienced an outage."
This morning Aio said via Twitter that it had "experienced an issue which affected some voice and messaging services" but that service was restored in the early morning hours. Aio spokeswoman Alejandra Arango reiterated to FierceWireless that only voice and messaging services were affected, but she declined to comment on a specific cause of the outage. "We haven't completed a full investigation on the cause," she said, adding that the company was focused on restoring service.
Aio has sought in recent weeks to ease customers' concerns that their service will be disrupted once AT&T finalizes its purchase of Leap Wireless (NASDAQ:LEAP) and Leap's Cricket prepaid brand. AT&T expects the deal to close sometime during the first quarter of 2014 and has said once it does it plans to close the Aio brand, which it only launched earlier this year.
Aio representatives have said that AT&T's Leap deal will make Aio even better. After the deal is approved, all Aio stores will be rebranded under the new Cricket brand. Aio has said under the Cricket brand, Aio customers will not see changes in their network coverage, and will not need to change their devices or phone numbers. It's unclear though if Aio or Cricket's pricing will change once the deal is completed. Aio's service uses AT&T's HSPA+ and LTE networks.
For more:
- see this AllThingsD article
- see these two separate Aio tweets
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