All three of the nation’s largest wireless carriers are experiencing technical difficulties Monday, with customers reporting outages across services.
T-Mobile’s Neville Ray took to Twitter to acknowledge the issues, while at the same time recommending alternate, data-based services that are not impacted.
Teams continue to work as quickly as possible to fix the voice & messaging problems some are seeing.
Data services are now available & some calls are completing. Alternate services like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Facetime etc. are available. Thanks for your patience.
— Neville (@NevilleRay) June 15, 2020
Neither Verizon nor AT&T have issued a similar statement. However, a look at Ookla’s Downdectector service shows a spike in complaints for both companies coinciding with T-Mobile’s issues. In the case of Verizon, 79% reported an issue with their mobile phone, 16% with mobile internet and 3% with landline internet service. In the case of AT&T, 79% reported an issue with the internet, 11% with their phone and 8% reported no network reception.
The fact that all three carriers started experiencing major problems around the same time would seem to indicate an issue with a shared network backbone, although no further details were available at time of writing.