Widespread Cell Outage Blamed on ‘IP Traffic Storm’
June 18, 2020 9:32AM CDT
- The outage that left hundreds of thousands of cell phone users without service Monday was caused by a storm, a T-Mobile official says. Not a traditional storm — but an “IP Traffic Storm.”
- Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s president of technology, says the widespread outage occurred when a “leased fiber circuit from a third-party provider in the Southeast” became overloaded. The overtaxed circuits created what’s known as an “IP traffic storm,” which spreads capacity issues across the national network.
- Many customers began experiencing problems Monday afternoon. Ray says the company finally got the issue fixed at 1 a.m. Tuesday. “Our engineers worked through the night to understand the root cause, address it and prevent it from happening again,” he says.
- How much would your life change if all cell phones stopped working? What modern innovation has changed your life the most?
