T-Mobile Hit By Phone Calling Outage (techcrunch.com) 60
T-Mobile appears to be having problems. TechCrunch: Customers are reporting that they can't make or receive phone calls, although data and text messages seem to be unaffected. DownDetector, which collects outage reports from users, indicates that a major outage is underway. It's not clear how widespread the issue is, but at the time of writing T-Mobile was trending across the United States on Twitter. The outage appears to have started around 10am PT (1pm ET) on Monday. 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 were intermittent, with bars occasionally dropping to zero or losing access to high-speed data.
Ting still works (Score:1)
Just tested - Ting still works connected to a T-Mobile tower, both to initiate and receive a call.
Re: Ting still works (Score:3)
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Hammered (Score:3)
We just switched 3 lines to T-Mobile last week, and yeah....we can't make or receive calls right now. Texts yes, calls no.
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T-Mobile to landline works (Score:2)
Our family are all on T-mobile, calling each other does not work, calling a landline does work
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It seems to be calls TO a T-Mobile number are the problem.
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Thanks for that hint, I turned on wifi calling and an old txt came through
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Same here, data service is working, txts sometimes get through, and I can call navy time service number in DC. Calls to a T-mobile number either get a fast busy signal, or just a "network error" on the screen before it drops.
Ok. Explains that (Score:3)
For us, inbound failed but outbound worked (Score:1)
(From same region) This morning my wife had someone who could not call her, but she was able to make an outbound call just fine - could be because we have WiFi calling enabled, which let it go out... but I would have thought inbound would work as well then.
Very odd!
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Weird all around.
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My company communicates by way of youtube videos and comments alone.
Worked for me, near Houston, TX (Score:2)
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Dumped Tmob a couple months ago (Score:2)
For 20+ bucks a month savings. Including a new phone that actually gets updates.
If I could have used my existing phone I would have saved about $49 a month over Tmob's "unlimited" charges.
Even though I terminated my account he first week of the month, they charged me for the whole month. Screw em.
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Who did you switch to?
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Who did you switch to?
Rectum, umm I mean the lowest data range of Spectrum.
Since I'm pretty much always home using WIFI instead of roaming data.ng
I've been using about 0% a month of my data
TMo or Sprint? (Score:2)
This may be because Sprint towers need to be reprogrammed to support T-Mobile due to the recent merger. Outages for such mergers are not usually talked about in advance because riots would brea.... wait a second!
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No I'm a Sprint Network Eng it's not effecting out CDMA network. Can't say anymore than that as I'm not on the big network side once the fire is put out I'll know more.
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Nope best company I've worked for. 3 years of working from home only doing Data Center Switch(Nexus)/Route(ASR) - Firewall (Palo/Juno) - LB (F5/10) work. All the overtime I want and I've learned allot. Granted this was when Marcelo was put in by SoftBank as CEO and he turned the company around from the last two asshat's running the company into the ground with the Sprint Center and campus boondoggles (let alone the tech issues). The merger couldn't happen until Sprint was right side up which it is.
The me
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Calls simply fail - no supplementary cause information (e.g. network congestion) so it seems VZW is having a similar outage?
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I would suspect (without troubleshooting myself) it's a bgp i-and/or-e issue maybe between peers.
Typically if it isn't a fiber cut it's something along that line which is harder to find but easy to fix vs fiber which is easy to find but harder to fix usually do to digging and getting the 30 union guys together to watch the new guy don the bonding (been there done that).
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I'm working from home and seeing an unusual number of lost connections through Comcast (5-6 today). The connection comes right back but normally it doesn't happen more than once.
Texts also affected (Score:2)
At least for me. I am with Mint Mobile, a T-Mobile reseller.
Working from home, and can not connect to the VPN, because the only option to get the one-time connection token is an SMS to my cell number.
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Turn on wifi calling if you can, txt should get through
Oh... (Score:1)
Well that explains a lot.
Ting to Tmobile (Score:2)
I just moved from Ting to Tmobile, due to Tmobile's $25 Connect plan. As much as I liked Ting, for my usage there, I was paying ~$45/mo, whereas I pay $25/mo PERIOD on the Tmobile Connect plan. Tried checking my voicemail.. Dead.. Tried calling my house phone - Dead.. Hey Tmobile.. FIX YOUR STUFF!!!!!
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>"Hey Tmobile.. FIX YOUR STUFF!!!!!"
In fairness, I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile many years ago because Sprint's network was a continuous disaster of lost calls, repeated or lost text messages, and never-ending data issues. I have never had a single problem with T-Mobile's service since the switch, nor heard about any issues until this incident. So I wouldn't be too quick to think this is typical (because it isn't).
Like others, I think this might be some botched thing with switching part of Sprint's
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Nope that would be incorrect. Like I said I'm on the Sprint CDMA side and we are not having a issue the tower integration has nothing to do with the technology or what DC it gets shunted to (CDMA vs GSM).
You do understand that 90% of all cell traffic is offloaded at the tower to the fiber networks right? It's mostly just back haul work so tower integration was blindingly simple compared to moving customers over to GSM handsets will be.
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There working on it the e-mails I'm seeing is *full stop - work on this* type of thing. Not my side of the house or I wouldn't be here typing away.
Nothing is ever fast enough for customers (me included) but that's a shit ton of switch/route i&e paths to check.
Its not just T-Mobile, almost all carriers (Score:4, Informative)
According to downdetector.com most all carriers had a sudden spike of outage starting around 2:40 or so. Something is up. Sun Spots?
Or, should I ask, who is it this time? North Korea? Russia? Iran? China?
https://downdetector.com/ [downdetector.com]
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Re: Its not just T-Mobile, almost all carriers (Score:1)
You might be onto something there: if you look at the a href="https://downdetector.com/status/t-mobile/map/">heatmap of the outage, they're all basically centered on major cities which had significant BLM/ANTIFA riots, and relatively redder where the riots were bigger and more violent / damaging.
What with ANTIFA being declared a terrorist orginazation, maybe the NSA accidentally bugged everyone, all at once, whilst tracking down those who dumb enoug to bring their personal surveillance devices to their r
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Don't overthink things, it was a peer bgp flap.
Re: Its not just T-Mobile, almost all carriers (Score:1)
Don't overthink things, it was a peer bgp flap.
Yes, I truly can imagine it was. Were they flapping those packets over to the new and improved Room 641As they have planted all over the country?
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Those are probably just people calling T-mobile because T-mobile has 90 000+ and Verizon only has <9000 and AT&T <4000.
Scope? (Score:2)
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Short scary answer? Maybe they don't know yet?
Longer story is that their support model isn't setup for regular updates to the general public. They don't even have a message on their homepage yet despite this outage exceeding a workday now.
Of course this is a P1 outage at which point you would think they would have regularly updates instead of just one acknowledging the problem. At least Microsoft gives you twice a day.
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Why is it scary? Are they expected to plan their outages carefully?
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If you've made no progress more than 8 hours into an outage then yes, that is scary. If it was a routing issue there are monitors and alarms that should be going off all over the place. If it was a bad switch firmware upgrade then they should have reverted a few by now and would have an message out stating they are reverting firmware
I'm a Tmo customer and normally I don't have any problems with them. I also work for an MSP and if a customer's environment was down this long and we didn't have any word out
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It's easy to second guess especially when you've only worked at small companies with just a few hundred switches, a couple of routers and hopefully a firewall.
I did the same thing until I started with Sprint it's not half as easy as your pretending it should be and nothing to do with raid drives that's not even in the apples vs oranges category of big network redundancies. I do full on OS upgrades on 7k/9k HA pairs and hardware/OS upgrades on forward facing firewalls all the time and you never see a blink
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So in other words you agreed with everything I said.
BGP flapping is something that most monitoring tools absolutely do detect. No need to get anything from the peer unless you only have one peer in which case your network design has again already failed. Now it can be tricky if your L3 connection for instance is flapping so you route to Cogent, CenturyLink, but then they could try to route you back on to L3's network and then you could be dead in the water again.
That problems can occur isn't the issue, the
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What matters is the uptime... over a long time period. We can still call landlines, 911 service is likely still working, so calm down.
You have no reason to believe it was switch firmware. It could be some sort of network attack, or a wide variety of things.
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It was a peer bgp flap.
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Of course we don't know yet if we did it would be fixed. The #1 rule in IT is - "The fix is easy, finding it is hard or it would already be fixed".
Trust me no one wants to have an outage it's not good for anyone.
All telco's do hourly reports T-Mo and Sprint uses Compass it's just 99% of people would not know how to access it or use it but it's public facing if you can setup a login. Our side (sprint.net - you need to be a customer with a sprint account) doesn't show any issue's as it's on the magenta side
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"Our engineers are working to resolve the widespread voice and text issue. We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly. In the meantime, we recommend using third-party connections, like ... [redacted]"
See, they told the truth! They're still working on it. Dunno yet.
Data and text are affected (Score:2)
Just called my wife who's on AT&T, I'm on T-Mo (Score:1)
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Could not Received Texts (Score:2)