100,000+ T-Mobile customers report outages, prompting customers from other carriers to report issues
Problems appear to have originated on T-Mobile's network
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Your support makes all the difference.T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint all received spikes in reported outages beginning at around midday eastern time on Monday.
Customers of the major carriers took to Twitter to complain that despite having full bars, they had no cell service. The outages did not appear to be complete outages though, as some users claiming to live in the same city using the same carriers reported different results.
Despite customers calling in from across the country, it appears the outage may be linked specifically to a problem occurring on T-Mobile's network, as the other carriers are denying massive issues on their networks.
At 4.18pm, T-Mobile's president of technology, Neville Ray, tweeted out an acknowledgement of the problem and told customers it was being examined.
"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," he wrote.
Many T-Mobile customers called for refunds or an application of phone credit to their accounts as compensation for the disruption to their service. One user, going by the name Middlemontana, said the company could not be susceptible to widespread outages if it intended to be a major carrier.
"It's 2020 a major outage like this nationwide simply cannot occur. You are essentially a utility company. If you don't have redundancy you aren't prepared to be the major data provider for the US with 5G," the user said.
Mike Murphy, editor of tech news outlet Protocol, originally reported that the outage might be limited solely to T-Mobile and theorised as to why the other companies were receiving outage calls from their customers.
"Interesting update: I've just been told that *one network* (appears to be TMO, waiting for confirmation) is having an issue, but because other people are calling people on that network, they think the issue is on their end, which is why downdetector looks like this," he wrote.
According to Down Detector, a website that monitors cell service and website outages, the carriers have collectively received more than 112,000 reports of outages today, with the majority - more than 100,000 - coming from T-Mobile customers. New York City, Texas, Florida, Georgia and California all reported significant outages.
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