T-Mobile faces FCC investigation into 'unacceptable' outages

FCC previously fined T-Mobile for 2014 outage

The Federal Communications Commission is launching a probe into the T-Mobile network outage that affected its customers across the country Monday.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai tweeted that the outage was “unacceptable” and said the commission would investigate what happened.

“We’re demanding answers—and so are American consumers,” he wrote.

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The intermittent outages for calls and texts started at about noon Eastern Monday and lasted until about 1 a.m. Tuesday, according to T-Mobile.

“We sincerely apologize for any and all inconveniences,” tweeted Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s network chief.

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The company said the outages were related to internet traffic that “created significant capacity issues” in its network throughout the day. However, it said that its data services still worked, allowing customers to communicate through other apps like FaceTime, Google Meet, Zoom and Skype.

Some customers of other carriers like Verizon and AT&T also reported issues Monday. But the companies said they had no problems with their networks. Any difficulty connecting was likely tied to T-Mobile’s issues.

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The outages came after T-Mobile already received government approval to merge with Sprint. The deal took the third- and fourth-largest carriers in the U.S. and made them the second-largest behind Verizon.

This wasn’t the first time T-Mobile has faced network outages. In August 2014, a three-hour outage prevented the company’s millions of customers from being able to call 911, according to the FCC. The commission fined T-Mobile $17.5 million to resolve the incident.

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