T-Mobile has been experiencing a major outage today that has affected its network across the country, resulting in many customers losing the ability to make phone calls, and in some cases, data as well.
So if you find yourself having trouble making calls right now, you aren’t alone. Major cities have been getting the worst of it due to the sheer amount of customers in those areas–like New York, Boston, Washington DC, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Seatle, Las Vegas, and more.
T-Mobile has responded that they are aware of the situation (it would have been quite an embarrassing surprise if they weren’t) and are working hard at restoring everything.
Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly.
— Neville (@NevilleRay) June 15, 2020
Although customers of other networks have reported trouble there as well, all other networks (carriers) seem to be operating normally. The issue is when their customers attempt to make a call to someone who is on the T-Mobile network, which can then result in an error.
(an update is available below)
There is a very good chance that this outage could have something to do with the fact that T-Mobile is pushing hard this week to join the T-Mobile and Sprint networks together, giving Sprint customers access to the same network and benefits. They planned on rolling out their next phase of this merger today (June 15th), which will automatically switch Sprint customers to the T-Mobile network when finished. What is likely an incredibly difficult process, it likely wouldn’t take much to create the biggest of complications if the wrong button is pressed somewhere.
Hopefully, T-Mobile can pull out of this quickly before too many customers think ill of them and start jumping ship. One thing to always keep in mind is that all companies experience something like this at some point in their lifespan, and it likely won’t be the last time this happens. This includes any carrier for that matter.
Update: Possible cause due to massive DDoS attacks – There has been a massive DDoS activity against multiple points within the US that has been going on for hours (see a live map of it here) that could possibly be behind the outage. No comments yet from T-Mobile in regards to this. The US isn’t the only one affected right now as it looks like a cyclone of events out there targeting multiple countries.
Co-Author: Ryan S, James H
