1.7 million T-Mobile subscribers hit by outage

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 14:26

IT Industry - Market

It has not been a good month for T-Mobile: first the Sidekick data loss escapade and now a network outage that has left more than a million and a half subscribers without voice and data services.

Yes, it really was less than a month ago that I was reporting right here on iTWire that users of the T-Mobile Danger Sidekick device had been told all their data was lost in the cloud.

At the time, T-Mobile and the Microsoft subsidiary Danger told users that "personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure".

Thankfully the doom and gloom prediction proved to be a little premature as, following something of a media shitstorm, Microsoft swung into action and managed to recover 'most of' the lost data leaving only a 'small number' without access to their data after all.

T-Mobile must have breathed a sigh of relief, which vanished up the wazoo yesterday as reports started to appear on Twitter detailing a loss of connectivity for users in the USA. One guy tweeted how all three T-Mobile devices were showing no bars, and others quickly joined in to report the network FAIL.

As O2 has discovered beforehand, the Twitterverse shines a powerful light on your darkest moments and there really is no option to hide anymore. Word of mouth is now published for all to read, and pretty soon everyone new that T-Mobile was in trouble.

The official T-Mobile America Twitter presence posted that it was "aware of the current service disruption" and that "rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible".

But it took six hours before T-Mobile could state that "we have fully restored services for customers affected by tonight's service disruption".

During that period, according to a T-Mobile spokesperson, 5% of customers in the US experienced service disruptions to both voice and data. No biggie you might think, but with a customer subscriber base of 33.5 million in the US that means the outage impacted on something like 1.7 million people.