SMARTPHONES

T-Mobile suffers another outage

Nov 03, 2009 10:32 pm | Network World
by Network World Staff

T-Mobile acknowledged a widespread service disruption Tuesday afternoon, the second high profile outage for the carrier in the past two months.

The carrier issued a statement via its Twitter account around 7:30 EST saying: "All – We’re aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible."

At 9pm EST, T-Mobile issued an update: "We’re making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers.  At this time, approximately 5 percent of T-Mobile customers are experiencing service disruptions. Issues began at approximately 5:30 p.m. Eastern time.  Our rapid response team is working continuously to fully resolve this disruption. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers"

Meanwhile, T-Mobile customers flooded Twitter with not so polite comments about the disruption, which made phone calls and text messaging impossible for some.

Last month, T-Mobile was at the center of controversy when its Sidekick mobile device users lost service and thought they would lose their data following an outage caused by server problems. In that case, T-Mobile shared the wrath of customers with Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary provides service to Sidekick customers.

From Sidekick to Gmail: A short history of cloud computing outages   Â