T-Mobile Suffers ‘Nationwide’ Outage, Forces Users’ iPhones Into ‘SOS’ Mode

T-Mobile customers had or still having issues connecting to T-Mobile over the past few hours.

The tech giant customers recently voiced out their concerns and complaints regarding the network problems they experienced on the night of Feb. 13, with many unable to call or carry out basic phone functions almost nationwide.

T-Mobile has yet to reveal if the problem is fixed on any of its public channels.

T-Mobile Nationwide Outage History

T-Mobile customers suddenly began experiencing network problems on the night of Feb. 13, with many unable to place calls, send text messages, and connect to the internet, per The Verge.

According to a tweet from Neville Ray, T-Mobile's president of technology, a third-party fiber interruption issue intermittently impacted some voice, messaging, and data services in several areas. However, he didn't mention what these areas are.

Users took to the internet to complain and express their concern online shortly after 6 PM on the same day, the number steadily growing as users became more and more frustrated, per WBOY.

Global monitoring service Downdetector showed that the reports steadily increased and spiked to 81,696 reports, with 61% complaining about having no signal on their phones while 29% had problems with their mobile phones. Meanwhile, 9% of the reports mentioned they had experienced a problem connecting to their mobile internet.

The number of reports has significantly decreased, as of press time, but new arrivals have yet to stop for the website.

Various websites providing similar services to DownDetector also found reports of outages, such as @downhounder.

Although many publications report that people in the US felt the outage nationwide, 9to5Mac mentioned that the problem doesn't appear to be nationwide, but rather isolated to certain geographic areas.

This outage is evidenced by T-Mobile customers seeing their iPhones displaying the "SOS" icon on their status bar, indicating that the device has no connectivity whatsoever. For those unaware, an SOS icon means that the phone is in SOS mode, allowing people to make emergency calls despite the lack of connectivity.

Eventually, T-Mobile became aware of the problem and addressed customers' concerns saying that it is "rapidly working to resolve" the problems. Additionally, the company responded to tweets from users experiencing problems, saying that it would review their complaints.

However, T-Mobile didn't reveal any more information than it already did.

T-Mobile Connectivity Restoration And Fix

Thankfully, T-Mobile, or more specifically, Ray, posted an update an hour after his previous post, saying that the company had seen significant improvement and is operating at near-normal levels.

However, not everyone found T-Mobile's connectivity problems fixed, though some customers discovered a solution for it.

According to these customers, they restored connectivity by toggling airplane mode on and off on their devices - resetting their connection in doing so. It is worth a try now that T-Mobile may be close to fixing the problem.