T-Mobile users across the U.S. reported major network outages on Monday night, preventing them from making calls, sending texts or connecting to the internet. In affected areas, including major cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, New York, and Seattle, the wireless carrier is working to restore service, which it says is operating at near-normal levels.
T-Mobile did not reveal how many users had been affected, but data from DownDetector, a service report generator based on user feedback, shows more than 83,000 complaints were filed at the peak of the outage on Monday at 10 p.m. Eastern time. At midnight, the number had fallen to about 9,000.
On DownDetector, users posted comments from Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. In tweets, users reported their phones appeared to be in “SOS mode” during the outages, meaning they could not connect directly to the network but could make emergency calls.
Leaders of T-Mobile tweeted that the carrier was working to resolve the disruptions, but they weren’t able to pinpoint the cause of or the extent of the outage. In several areas, some voice, messaging and data services have been intermittently impacted by a 3rd party fiber interruption issue, according to T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray.
AT&T and Verizon Wireless also experienced modest service disruptions Monday night. Verizon received over 2,000 unresolved incident reports, and T-Mobile received over 1,200.
AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile declined to comment.
