- T-Mobile said service was fully restored but didn’t disclose the cause of Monday’s outage
- The timing was especially awkward, coming soon after T-Mobile began moving some customers off older rate plans and onto pricier ones
- Verizon wasted little time reminding consumers that its own network was operating normally
T-Mobile said it fully restored service after a network outage affected customers across the country on Monday. The carrier didn’t disclose what caused the outage.
“We have fully restored service for all customers and sincerely apologize for the difficulties to those who experienced network impacts today,” T-Mobile said in a statement on X.
Customers started reporting problems around 4 p.m. Eastern time on Monday and service appeared to be mostly restored by 11 p.m. ET, but some customers still reported problems this morning.
Update: After this story first published, a T-Mobile spokesperson told Fierce that service was fully restored as of 10 p.m. ET on Monday. If people are still having issues today, it’s likely related to severe weather issues that they’re seeing in certain parts of the U.S. today.
T-Mobile didn’t say how many people were affected. At its peak, more than 64,000 people reported problems, according to Downdetector, but users on Reddit speculated that many more people than that experienced problems with their service.
StatusGator noted on social media that the outage affected not only T-Mobile but its prepaid brands Mint Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile and MVNOs like Google Fi and to some extent, Boost Mobile. Some customers were getting no connectivity or SOS mode only.
Bad timing
Obviously, there’s no “good time” for a network outage and all the big carriers have experienced them.
In January, Verizon blamed a “software issue” for a major network outage that lasted for nearly 10 hours; it ended up offering customers a $20 account credit.
In February 2024, AT&T pointed to a software glitch for problems that affected thousands of customers across the county for an extended time.
T-Mobile’s outage this week occurred shortly after some customers were informed last month that they’re being moved off older rate plans and in some cases, onto plans that cost as much as $6 more per line. As expected, that did not go over well.
Customers griped about that in their social media comments on Monday, with some saying they were considering a switch to Verizon or someone else.
For its part, Verizon used social media to let people know that it was not experiencing any problems on Monday.
“Our network is operating normally nationwide. If you're having trouble reaching someone, it may be due to the reported outage on T-Mobile's network,” Verizon told consumers.
Read more about network outages:
Verizon outage: Analysts and more weigh in
RESOLVED: Big Verizon outage impacting NY, DC, more
AT&T says that Winter Storm Fern outage is power-related
This story was updated with additional comment from T-Mobile.