(AP/WSVN) — T-Mobile, one of the three largest mobile carriers in the U.S., said it’s working to fix a widespread “voice and data issue.”
The company’s president of technology, Neville Ray, tweeted Monday afternoon at around 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time that T-Mobile engineers hope to fix the problem soon. At 6 p.m., Ray tweeted that data services were back up, but that calls and texts were still having problems. He recommended customers use WhatsApp, iMessage and other communications tools instead.
The announcement comes as cellphone customers with various carriers in multiple states have reported outages with their service.
According to Down Detector, customers in multiple states, including Florida, Georgia, Texas, New York, California are reporting issues with T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
The scope of the outage wasn’t clear, but Ray said it has affected customers around the country. T-Mobile representatives did not reply to further questions.
AT&T and Verizon both said their networks were operating normally. But calls between their customers and T-Mobile customers could have problems because of T-Mobile’s issues.
According to Down Detector, as of 3:56 p.m., there were over 100,000 reports of outages for T-Mobile, over 8,000 at Verizon, 3,400 at AT&T and 1,589 reports for Sprint.
People on Twitter complained that calls were not going through. The Redmond, Washington, police department tweeted that T-Mobile customers should have “an alternate plan in place in the event you need to call 911.”
Tweets from angry customers filled the pages of their respective carriers.
We can definitely check on this for you, send a DM our way and we'll get you taken care of. ^Erica Ramos
— T-Mobile Help (@TMobileHelp) June 15, 2020
https://twitter.com/VZWSupport/status/1272602237781577730
https://twitter.com/sprintcare/status/1272569670667603968
Hello Eli, let's check on your service status. Please DM us your account info and ZIP code so we can get to work. ^LuisO https://t.co/mIqyBsCU0E
— AT&T Help (@ATTHelp) June 15, 2020
T-Mobile became one of the country’s largest carriers, along with AT&T and Verizon, after buying rival Sprint. The company has started integrating the two networks.
The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees voice and data networks, said its public-safety bureau is looking into the problem.
T-Mobile paid a $17.5 million fine for two nationwide service outages on the same day in August 2014, which together lasted three hours and prevented customers from being able to call 911.
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