T-Mobile experienced a network disruption affecting its legacy LTE core infrastructure in the Northeast and Midwest regions early Thursday morning, though the carrier says the issue has been resolved.
The outage began around 3 AM ET and primarily impacted customers still operating on T-Mobile's older LTE network, while leaving the carrier's 5G Standalone network unaffected. As reported by PhoneArena, customers in states including Ohio, New Jersey, and Massachusetts reported losing cellular service, with many devices displaying emergency-only "SOS" mode.
The disruption also extended beyond T-Mobile's direct customers to affect Mint Mobile subscribers, demonstrating how MVNO partners can be impacted when host network infrastructure experiences problems. Users reported being unable to access not just voice and data services, but also T-Mobile's customer portal and T-Life application, suggesting the issue affected multiple network components.
"Our teams resolved a service issue affecting a small number of customers on our older LTE core network in the Northeast and Midwest, and restarting devices will reconnect them to the network," a T-Mobile representative confirmed. "Our 5G Standalone network was not impacted."
The incident underscores the operational complexity carriers face while maintaining legacy network infrastructure alongside newer 5G deployments. T-Mobile has advised affected customers to perform a device restart to reconnect to the network, with early reports suggesting this simple fix is resolving connectivity issues for most users.
Source: PhoneArena
