T-Mobile USA suffered a cellular data outage on its HSPA and HSPA+ networks Monday night that appears to have affected customers across the country. The carrier has since restored service.
The outage appears to have started around 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time Monday night. T-Mobile's official Twitter account confirmed that the company was "experiencing a network data issue. Service for some customers may be impacted." The company said service was restored by 10:30 p.m. ET and several hours later, around 12:15 a.m. Eastern Time Tuesday morning, T-Mobile sent out a message on Twitter that full service had been restored.
According to The Verge, customers from across the country complained about the issues on T-Mobile's online customer support forums and on Twitter.
"T-Mobile experienced a network data issue Monday night that affected service for some customers with a 3G or 4G device," the company said in a statement. "Some customers were not able to initiate a data session, or experienced intermittent data connectivity."
"Rapid response engineering teams identified and resolved the issue," the carrier said. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
A T-Mobile spokeswoman declined to comment on what caused the data outage or how widespread the problem was, but the company said in an updated statement that its engineers were investigating the cause of the outage. Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Nokia Siemens Networks are T-Mobile's two primary network infrastructure vendors, and have been tapped to upgrade T-Mobile's network to LTE as part of a $4 billion network modernization.
In November 2009 T-Mobile suffered a voice and data service disruption that affected around 1.7 million customers. However, other carriers have also been blemished by outages recently. In February, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) was hit with a brief LTE service disruption, and had experienced three brief LTE outages in December and four overall in 2011 (it also had an outage in April). In December, Verizon explained that the 2011 outages were due to technical problems with Verizon's IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture.
For more:
- see this Twitter page
- see this AllThingsD article
- see this The Verge article
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Artcle updated July 3, at 2:10 p.m. ET, with additional information from T-Mobile.