T-Mobile, Sprint Customers Report Service Outages

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA/AP) - T-Mobile, one of the three largest mobile carriers in the U.S., said it's working to fix a widespread "voice and data issue" affecting customers in Southern California and other U.S. states.

The company's president of technology, Neville Ray, tweeted Monday afternoon at around 1 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time that T-Mobile engineers hope to fix the problem soon.

At 3 p.m., Ray tweeted that data services were back up, but that calls and texts were still having problems. He recommended customers use WhatsApp, iMessage and other communications tools instead.

The scope of the outage wasn't clear, but Ray said it has affected customers around the country. T-Mobile representatives did not reply to further questions.

People on Twitter complained that calls were not going through.

The Redmond, Washington, police department tweeted that T-Mobile customers should have "an alternate plan in place in the event you need to call 911."

Some 93,000 reports of T-Mobile outages alone were logged by service tracker website Down Detector shortly after noon.

Verizon and US Cellular customers were also affected, with outages also reported in Texas, Florida, New York, and Georgia.

Users reported being unable to send out or receive text message or phone calls.

After initial reports of AT&T customers being impacted, the company said its network was "operating normally."

Verizon also disputed reports of service outages, telling CBSLA: "We understand Downdetector is falsely reporting Verizon network issues. Sites such as Downdetector.com utilize limited crowdsourced data drawn from sample social posts which are often statistically insignificant or factually incorrect."

(© Copyright 2020 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)