T-Mobile hit with cell phone outage, voice and text down for thousands of users throughout U.S.

UPDATE, 6:50pm PT: AT&T tells Boing Boing, “We do not have an issue with our network,” and points us to this @ATTNEWS tweet: “Our network is operating normally, but it’s possible some customers are unable to reach people on other carriers’ networks.”

Cellular provider T-Mobile has been having a very large service outage today, Monday June 15. The service interruptions were reported by Verizon users starting around 10amPT/1pm ET.
It’s affecting thousands of customers in several states.

T-Mobile said it’s working to fix the situation, and blames a widespread “voice and data issue.”

There is no evidence, and despite rumormongers there are no credible reports, of a DDoS attack or other cyberattack being the cause for the T-Mobile network failure or related impact on users of AT&T and Verizon today.

A Verizon company spokesperson told this Boing Boing writer that a routing problem was blamed.

T-Mobile’s president of technology said later in the day that some users are still having problems with calls and texts, and recommended customers using WhatsApp, iMessage and other communications tools instead.

From TechCrunch:

In our own tests in New York and Seattle, we found that making calls from a T-Mobile phone would fail almost immediately after placing the call. We also found that the cell service on our phones was intermittent, with bars occasionally dropping to zero or losing access to high-speed data.

In April, Sprint and T-Mobile completed its merger, valued at $26 billion, making the combined cell network the third largest carrier in the United States behind AT&T and Verizon.

Others have reported issues on other networks. When reached, spokespeople for AT&T and Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) said their networks were operating normally. Sprint has not yet responded to a request for comment.

There is no evidence that the outage is caused by a cyberattack. One wire report said Level 3, a major fiber network backbone that cell networks rely on for routing calls and messages, was experiencing an outage, which may have explained the network outages.

But a spokesperson for CenturyLink, which owns Level 3, said that there was no current outage on its network.

Observations and reporting from Twitter, below.