Widespread Outage Slams T-Mobile

Troubled T-Mobile reported early Nov. 4 it has restored service after a widespread outage disrupted service for nearly 2 million customers. The outage began at approximately 5 p.m. EST on Nov. 3 and T-Mobile said service was restored about 10:30 p.m. EST.

"T-Mobile confirms it has fully restored voice and text [and] picture messaging services for customers affected by intermittent service disruptions on Tuesday. About 5 percent of our customers across various geographies were affected for much of Tuesday evening," T-Mobile said in a Twitter to customers.

So far, T-Mobile has not indicated what caused the outage.

"Our sole focus has been restoring full services for all customers; we are now investigating the root cause of the incident. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers," the T-Mobile Twitter said.

The incident follows a service outage Oct. 2 that hit T-Mobile's 800,000 Sidekick smartphone customers. Although the outage turned out be Microsoft's fault, the two outages add to a public perception of poor quality of service from the nation's fourth-largest carrier.

On Oct. 10, T-Mobile issued a statement on its corporate online forum suggesting that many Sidekick users' personal data, including contacts and calendar entries, had been wiped out due to server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger.

The problem was eventually determined to be a hardware issue, and in a follow-up T-Mobile post on Oct. 12, the Sidekick's 800,000 users were urged to not turn off the device or remove the battery, lest it attempt to synchronize with the damaged servers.

Three days later, the situation seemed not quite so catastrophic, as the companies made an effort to restore lost data.