Hundreds of Thousands T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon users around the country were reported to have experienced a cell phone outage earlier today, Monday, June 15.
By: Clarissa Arceo
The issues appears to have started around 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Many were unable to make and/or receive calls- affecting the Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, New York, and Tampa areas the most.
Customers turned to DownDetector, a third-party service that monitors hundreds of other internet services and tracks underlying issues within sites.
After being flooded with comments surrounding the issue, a spokesperson from Verizon addresses the fault in the solution, “A lot of factors can contribute to a false report on a third-party website… a faulty device, network traffic that slows but doesn’t inhibit connections, commercial RF blockers, human error, network issues impacting other carriers and more”.
Representatives from the cell services did not reply to further comments regarding the problem which then started to clear up after numerous reports and complaints later that afternoon.
A spokesperson for T-Mobile also did not immediately comment on the outage, but T-Mobile’s technology chief Neville Ray tweeted:
“Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly”.
There is no evidence that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Matthew Prince, chief executive at Cloudflare, a global content delivery network, said in a tweet that the company saw no spikes in internet traffic during the outage. Service has not yet been restored normally until 6:00 PM PST.
