T-Mobile nationwide outage knocks thousands of phones into “SOS”
UPDATE: 07/27 5:32 PM EST BY JOE FEDEWA
Service is slowly restoring for some
Read the full update below.
You’re not alone if your phone is suddenly showing “SOS” instead of the familiar “5G” in the status bar. Tens of thousands of people across the country appear to be without T-Mobile service. The outage began around 4 PM ET on July 27th.
Members of the How-To Geek staff first noticed that their phone on T-Mobile’s network was showing as “SOS” only. Upon further investigation, it was clear that many people are having the same issue. Downdetector shows over 60K reports, and the T-Mobile subreddit is being flooded with threads from customers without service. It appears that over 200K users are affected.
The outage appears to be influencing more than just T-Mobile customers, too. A few MVNOs that rely on the T-Mobile network, Spotify, Xbox Live, and even Verizon and AT&T are also experiencing difficulties at the moment. However, it’s likely these reports stem from T-Mobile customers not being able to access services and trying to call people on other networks.
About an hour since the first reports started appearing on Downdetector, the outage reports seemed to have plateaued at around 62K. We’re now finally seeing the numbers go down, and people on the HTG staff are back online. However, there are many across the country still reporting that they are without service, and have been for nearly two hours. An outage of this size doesn’t get resolved all at once.
