T-Mobile customers across the country couldn’t make calls or send text messages for about four hours yesterday, confirms the carrier. The T-Mobile outage began around 6 pm ET and was resolved by about 10:30 pm ET.
Our own FierceWireless senior editor Monica Alleven said, “I was able to get texts and calls during the time of the outage yesterday with T-Mobile, so it didn't affect every subscriber.”
According to a report from TechCruch, the outage seemed to affect some subscribers’ texts and voice service, but it did not affect their mobile data.”
In response to a number of questions from FierceWireless about cause and location of the outage and the number of customers affected, a T-Mobile spokesperson referred us to two tweets that didn’t provide any details: one from T-Mobile CEO John Legere and one from CTO Neville Ray:
Some customers are experiencing intermittent call issues on our network. Thanks for your patience... @NevilleRay and team are working to resolve the problem ASAP and have already started to see signs of recovery.
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) August 22, 2019
Update: Call issues are resolved and service is back to normal. We apologize to those impacted by the disruption. https://t.co/tkVcGaN7Pl
— Neville (@NevilleRay) August 22, 2019
A spokesperson for Verizon took the opportunity to give a tweet jab to T-Mobile:
4 hours alone with your silent @TMobile device? Can't communicate with customers, text your employees, call your vendors. RELIABILITY is why more small, medium & large businesses choose @verizon : T-Mobile hit by hours-long nationwide outage – TechCrunch https://t.co/2uxSMR2fGh
— Jeffrey Nelson (@JNels) August 22, 2019
These kinds of mobile outages are relatively rare. Earlier this summer AT&T suffered a nationwide service outage for about two hours that prevented AT&T cellphone customers from calling 911 or sending text messages.
RELATED: AT&T suffers nationwide 911 service outage
T-Mobile is pretty focused, for now, on closing its $26.5 billion merger with Sprint. Its top executives have been spending their time on the phone with FCC commissioners to propel the deal.
RELATED: T-Mobile execs dial up FCC chair, commissioners
Legere joked on the carriers’ most recent earnings call, saying “For the foreseeable past, Mike [Sievert] and I have spent every day in Washington, D.C., only briefly calling back to Matt [Staneff, the company's CMO] to see how the business was going, and the business had all-time record results,” according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.