T-Mobile problems in Northeast caused by power outage

Customers in the East Coast are having trouble placing calls, receiving or sending texts, and connecting to data

T-Mobile subscribers are reporting issues with service and connectivity today, starting around 12:30 PM ET. Reports at venues such as Twitter, Reddit, and Downdetector indicate the outage might be geographically widespread across the East Coast, though not all customers are affected and, problems may be intermittent. According to T-Mobile, the cause of the issue was a power outage.

Reports of an outage started to spike at around 12:15, with customers having general connectivity issues and anecdotal reports of problems with placing calls, recieving/sending text messages, and issues with data connectivity. I can confirm problems placing calls as a T-Mobile subscriber in Massachusetts. Locations of those affected in reports include New York City, Boston, and Washington DC. A map of reports on Downdetector indicates the problem may be localized to the Northeast, which T-Mobile subsequently confirmed was the location most affected.

Map of reported outages, courtesy of Downdetector.

Some affected subscribers claim that rebooting their devices fixes the issue.

We reached out to T-Mobile for more information and a representative from the company provided us with the following statement after publication:

A commercial power outage earlier today has caused intermittent impacts to some voice calls, data and messaging in parts of the Northeast. Our teams will continue working on full service restoration.

Reports of issues on the network continue, with Downdetector reporting a more recent spike. T-Mobile has modified the statement it provided to Android Police once to remove reference to power having been restored, so the issue may be ongoing.

The @TMobile and @T-MobileHelp accounts have also been responding to individual inquiries recognizing the issue and explaining that its employees are working to address the problem. From the details provided, it sounds like the issue may be partly outside of T-Mobile's hands.

Recently, T-Mobile had an issue with connectivity for LG phones on its network. That specific issue was resolved on May 23rd and had entirely different symptoms, with certain LG phones on the carrier network providing an "LG IMS has Stopped" error message, seemingly tied to a change that was rolled out in T-Mobile's network.