Voice, Data Outage Strikes T-Mobile Customers

T-Mobile, Bellevue, Wash., sent the following statement to Channelweb.com late Tuesday:

"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."

Last month, an outage affecting T-Mobile's Sidekick service caused some subscribers to lose personal data such as address book contacts and calendar entries. T-Mobile halted sales of the Sidekick and Microsoft eventually admitted that the outage was caused by a server failure within its Danger subsidiary, which runs the Sidekick service.

Microsoft subsequently claimed to have restored "most, if not all" customer data, but T-Mobile recently said some customers' data still hasn't been recovered.

T-Mobile, whose Web site is still showing the Sidekick as "Temporarily out of stock," has been unfairly criticized for the Sidekick outage. Tuesday's outage couldn't have come at a worse time for the carrier, which ranks a distant fourth place in the U.S. market and has been rumored to be considering acquisitions.