According to reports from Downdetector, a website that tracks outages across various services, T-Mobile users in the United States were hit by a widespread outage on February 14. Thousands of users across the country reported problems with voice calls, text messages, and mobile data.
T-Mobile responded with a tweet acknowledging the outage and apologizing for the inconvenience caused to its customers. The tweet provided no information about the cause of the outage or when it is expected to be resolved.
T-Mobile did not say how many customers were affected, but data from DownDetector shows that at the peak of the outage on Monday at 10 p.m. Eastern time, customers lodged more than 83,000 complaints. By midnight, the number had dropped to around 9,000. The outage appeared to be most severe in the Northeast and on the West Coast, with New York City and Los Angeles among the most affected areas, according to Downdetector.
Users reported that their service had been switched to “SOS mode,” which meant that they were no longer directly connected to a network but could still make emergency calls.
T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray issued a statement about the outage on Twitter early Tuesday after tweeting that the company was “addressing a 3rd party fiber interruption issue that has intermittently impacted some voice, messaging and data services in several areas.”
T-Mobile’s network outage is not the first time it has occurred. The company experienced a major outage in 2020 that lasted several hours and affected customers across the country.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.