Tough 2009 for T-Mobile: Approx. 6 Hour Outage on Nov. 3

The great T-Mobile national blackout of November 3, 2009 will probably be remembered for, um, days. Maybe even weeks. I first learned about it after reading a tweet from a friend who noticed it early on. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about since my voice and 3G service worked throughout the service outage period that apparently lasted around 6 hours.

I’m as puzzled as anyone why both my voice and data service remained unaffected while a co-worker around the corner from me was unable to make outgoing calls (but had 3G) and others lost all T-Mobile voice and data service.

The…

T-Mobile Forum thread discussing the outage

…is down for maintenance as I write this around 3:45am Eastern. So, I can’t see T-Mobile’s most recent comments nor the comments of their customers. You can see the Twitter tweet sequence from @TMobile_USA during the outage int the screen shot above. It is sparse to be sure but does indicate progress with each tweet.

Combine this outage with the recent Sidekick data loss incident makes 2009 a tough one for T-Mobile USA.

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