On Monday, June 15th it appears T-Mobile experienced a major outage that affected thousands of their customers. Customers weren’t able to make or receive phone calls and text messaging was also affected.
T-Mobile customers quickly flocked to DownDetector, a website that collects outage reports, and customers were met with the frustrating results that T-Mobile was experiencing an outage. It’s reported the outage started between 12 PM – 1 PM EST and data services were fixed by 6 PM EST that same day. Around 12 PM EST, 6 hours after the previous update, T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert said, “We are recovering from this now but it may still take several more hours before customer calling and texting is fully recovered.”
It seems T-Mobile customers weren’t the only ones affected, the newest subsidiary of T-Mobile, Sprint, as well as U.S. Cellular also experienced issues.
The outage has customers wondering, what happened?
The reason for the outage is still unclear, however, T-Mobile has reportedly said on Tuesday morning that it was an “IP traffic-related issue that has created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day.”
FCC chairman Ajit Pai tweeted that the outage was “unacceptable” and that the FCC would launch an investigation into what happened.
Rumors circulated that it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but no evidence has backed this claim up. Brian Krebs, a security researcher, tweeted out, “I have found no indication these outages are DDoS related. Rather, there may be Sprint/T-Mobile issues related to a wonky update in the systems from the Sprint side to help merge with T-Mobile. Not sure what may be up w/ other carriers.”
It appears the issue has been resolved, but what officially happened? We’re unsure for now.