US Mobile Operators Suffer Outages, Issues

Tom Jowitt,
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Number of US mobile operators including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon experienced outages and difficulties late Monday

A number of mobile operators in the United States have suffered outages and technical difficulties on Monday night.

Service tracking website Downdetector indicated that AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Boost Mobile all experienced a spike in reports Monday night.

It was unclear at the time of writing if the problems were connected, but T-Mobile told Reuters it was addressing a disruption that had affected some cellular services.

Mobile outages

T-Mobile reportedly said it was working on resolving a problem that had caused intermittent issues with voice, messaging, and data services in several areas.

However the US operator did not say how many users had been affected.

The Downdetector website revealed a spike in user reported problems between 3am and 6am (GMT).

Neville Ray, president of technology for T-Mobile tweeted on late Monday that the operator was dealing with a fibre interruption at a third party that intermittently impacted some voice, messaging and data services in several areas.

“We have seen significant improvement and are operating at near normal levels,” he tweeted later.

But at the same time Downdetector also reported thousands of reports of services of other US operators Verizon and AT&T being down.

The website showed more than 2,000 unresolved incident reports for Verizon and more than 1,200 for AT&T at the peaks, Reuters noted.

Security breaches

Last month T-Mobile confirmed another theft of customer data.

In a SEC filing, T-Mobile admitted that on 25 November, an unidentified malicious intruder breached its network via a single Application Programming Interface (API) and stole data on 37 million customers, including billing addresses, phone numbers, email, dates of birth and T-Mobile account numbers.

This was not the first time that T-Mobile has been compromised.

In August 2021 it confirmed that had suffered “unauthorised access” to its systems after customer data appeared for sale on a hacking forum, said to be related to 80 million people obtained from T-Mobile servers.

In July 2022, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million to customers who filed a class action lawsuit and it agreed to spend an additional $150 million to upgrade data security.

Besides this, T-Mobile has also disclosed breaches in January 2021, November 2019 and August 2018 in which customer information was accessed.

And in 2015 the personal data on 15 million T-Mobile USA customers appeared online for sale.