UPDATED 6/18, 1:40 p.m. ET: T-Mobile issued an apology on Tuesday, which according to The Verge, blames a fiber-optic circuit that failed, causing a "chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through."
“We did not meet our own bar for excellence,” T-Mobile’s CTO wrote in the apology.
See original story below.
Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile, acknowledged in a tweet Monday afternoon that the company was "working to resolve a voice and data issue" which was impacting customers across the United States.
According to the service tracker Down Detector, T-Mobile started seeing a substantial spike in reports between 12 and 1 p.m. ET. The number of reports reached its peak of over 101,000 a few hours later.
Even though AT&T and Verizon received a considerable amount of reports, spokespeople for both carriers told Business Insider that their networks were "operating at normal service levels." TechCrunch reports T-Mobile's service issue may be tied to a rumored outage in a fiber network known as Level 3, which is used by cell networks to route calls and messages. Sorry, cyberattack conspiracy theorists.
Of course, people took to social media to make light of T-Mobile's service woes and to complain.
It doesn't look like the issue is entirely fixed, as Ray suggests some alternative communication methods in the meantime.
