FCC Chairman Pledges Investigation Of 'Unacceptable' T-Mobile Outage
Monday's outage to T-Mobile voice and text services around the U.S. lasted 13 hours.
The Federal Communications Commission plans to investigate the widespread outage at wireless giant T-Mobile that lasted for about 13 hours on Monday.
T-Mobile's voice and text services went down for many customers shortly after noon Eastern Time. The carrier said just after 1 a.m. ET on Tuesday that services had been restored.
[Related: It's Official: T-Mobile-Sprint Merger Closes To Create 'New T-Mobile']
"The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wrote in a tweet Tuesday. "The @FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers—and so are American consumers."
T-Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Pai's tweet Tuesday.
On Monday afternoon, an outage map on downdetector.com showed the T-Mobile outage affecting customers in many of the largest U.S. cities--including New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In a statement posted on T-Mobile's website, CEO Mike Sievert blamed an "IP traffic related issue" for the outage, saying it had "created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day."
Matthew Prince, CEO of DDoS protection vendor Cloudflare, said on Twitter that T-Mobile was changing network configurations on Monday, and that the outage didn't appear to be the result of a DDoS attack.
"From @Cloudflare's vantage point, we can see a number of things that show there is no massive DDoS attack," Prince tweeted.
Second, there is no spike in traffic to any of the major Internet Exchanges, which you do see during actual DDoS attacks and definitely would during one allegedly this disruptive. 6/X pic.twitter.com/5zZCRwjsWo
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) June 16, 2020
On April 1, T-Mobile announced the official closing of its $26.5 billion merger with Sprint.