Phone Service Issues Appear Across USA: T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon

On the afternoon of June 15, 2020, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint appeared to be having issues with connectivity. Phone voice calls and data connections seemed to be extremely slow and/or broken entirely for several hours. At 3:18 PM Central Time, CEO Neville Ray posted a Twitter message suggesting the network was being fixed.

"Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country," wrote Neville Ray. "We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly." This Tweet was published on June 15th, 2020, at 3:18 PM.

Other carriers seemed to be having connectivity issues in the afternoon as well. Outages seemed to be widespread as of around 1:30-2:00 PM Central Time. According to DownDetector, Verizon issues seemed to start appearing at around 1:30 PM, and rise sharply shortly thereafter.

As it often the situation when it comes to network down-time and reports, it would seem that network outage hotspots are centered in New York, Florida, Michigan, Minneapolis / Saint Paul, Chicago, Washington, and Southern California. The most reported locations for Verizon were Brooklyn, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Tampa, Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago.

AT&T's reported network issues seemed to ramp up at precisely the same time as Verizon, at or around 1:30 PM Central Time. As with Verizon, complaints were mostly in the cellular phone (calls) category, but a significant percentage of people also complained about Internet connectivity speed.

Sprint complaints were almost entirely Phone-centric. Sprint complaints (as reported by DownDetector) were 87% Phone-centric, 8% Mobile Internet, and 3% Total Blackout. Consumer Cellular had an almost identical mix of complaint percentage points – mostly Phone.

Stay tuned as we learn more about the issues and how it's possible that all four major networks (and their associated brands) had major network issues all at the same time, across the United States.

NOTE: While each of the carriers seemed to have significant issues starting at 1:30 PM, T-Mobile saw the most major hit of complaints, according to DownDetector. Where the other three major carriers had less than 9k complaints at their peak, T-Mobile's peak was over 100k.

UPDATE: As noted by a Verizon representative: "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. A lot of factors can contribute to a false report on a third-party website ... a faulty device, network traffic that slows but doesn't inhibit connections, commercial RF blockers, human error, network issues impacting other carriers and more. These types of sites do not evaluate and confirm the crowd-sourced data that they receive, they simply aggregate it and report it. The result can be faulty reports of network performance interruptions causing wide-spread miscommunication for wireless users."