Customers on the East Coast have trouble making calls, receiving or sending text messages and connecting to data
T-Mobile subscribers report service and connection issues today, starting around 12:30 ET. Reports on venues such as Twitter, Reddit and Downdetector indicate that the outcome may be geographically widespread across the East Coast, although not all customers are affected and issues may be periodic. According to T-Mobile, the cause of the problem was a power outage.
Reports of a power outage began to rise around noon. 12.15, where customers had general connection problems and anecdotal reports of problems making calls, receiving / sending text messages and problems with data connection. I can confirm problems with making calls as a T-Mobile subscriber in Massachusetts. Locations of those affected in reports include New York City, Boston and Washington DC. A map with reports on Downdetector indicates that the problem may be located to the northeast, which T-Mobile subsequently confirmed was the place most affected.
Map of reported outcomes, with permission from Downdetector.
Some affected subscribers claim that restarting their devices solves the problem.
We contacted T-Mobile for more information, and a representative from the company gave us the following statement after the announcement:
A commercial power outage earlier today has caused periodic impacts of some voice calls, data and messages in parts of the Northeast. Our teams will continue to work on full service recovery.
Reporting issues on the network continues and Downdetector reports a recent increase. T-Mobile has changed the statement it gave to Android Police once to remove the reference that power has been restored so that the problem may be ongoing.
That @T Mobile and @ T-MobileHelp accounts also have the response to individual inquiries acknowledging the problem and explaining that its employees are working to resolve the issue. From the details provided, it sounds as if the problem is partly out of the hands of T-Mobile.
Recently, T-Mobile had a problem connecting to LG phones on its network. The specific issue was resolved on May 23 and had completely different symptoms, with some LG phones on the mobile network giving an “LG IMS has Stopped” error message that was apparently linked to a change being rolled out in T-Mobile’s network .
UPDATE: 2022/05/31 16:24 EST BY RYNE HAGER
T-Mobile statement
Our coverage has been updated with a statement from T-Mobile with an explanation of the problem.
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