T-Mobile Outage to Be Probed as FCC Head Wants Answers

(Bloomberg) -- A T-Mobile US Inc. service outage, which kept thousands of customers from making calls or using data on Monday, will be investigated by the Federal Communications Commission.

“The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai tweeted on Monday evening, saying that the agency would launch a probe into the matter. “We’re demanding answers -- and so are American consumers.”

Voice and text services have been restored, T-Mobile network chief Neville Ray said in a Twitter post.

“These issues are now resolved,” T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer Mike Sievert said in a statement time stamped 10:03 p.m. Pacific Standard time Monday on the company’s website. “We again apologize for any inconvenience.”

T-Mobile shares were down 1.3% in premarket trading in New York on Tuesday.

T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom AG, also suffered problems. CEO Tim Hoettges said in a press conference that an overnight outage in Europe stemmed from issues with the company’s 5G rollout.

The U.S. problem comes at an awkward time for T-Mobile. The company finally got government clearance a few months ago to acquire Sprint Corp., arguing that the two carriers could form a strong challenger to AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. T-Mobile is now the second-biggest U.S. carrier -- based on regular monthly subscribers -- and it’s vowed to build the best 5G network in the industry.

Sievert said earlier in the day that the carrier had hundreds of our engineers and vendor partner staff working to resolve this issue.

Because of T-Mobile’s network problems, callers with other service providers were having trouble connecting to T-Mobile customers, giving an impression that other carriers were also experiencing disruptions.

Representatives for AT&T and Verizon said their networks were performing well.

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