T-Mobile Outage Disrupts Wireless Network Across US, Companies Deny DDoS Attack

T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS on Monday suffered a widespread outage across the United States, disrupting connectivity across cellular networks.

What Happened

According to an outage tracker Downdetector, complaints started pouring in around 12:30 PM ET and continue through press time. T-Mobile President of Technology Neville Ray acknowledged the glitch on Twitter, and said the company engineers "are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country." The world's third-largest telecom operator in April completed its merger with the Softbank Group Corp-owned SFTBY smaller rival Sprint, and the combined company has more than 100 million customers in the country.

Social Media Reports On DDoS Unsubstantiated

Several users on social media, including Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California, claimed that there was a massive "DDoS" or "Distributed Denial of Service" attack on the major US networks.

Verizon Communications Inc. VZ denied that it suffered any outage, let alone a DDoS attack. "Verizon's network is performing well. We're aware that another carrier is having network issues. Calls to and from that carrier may receive an error message," a spokesperson for the company told Gizmodo.

Security researchers, including Bad Packets Report and MalwareTech, also rubbished the claims of a DDoS attack, where a malicious entity intends to bar the users from obtaining the services of the network by overwhelming it with false requests.

"There's a lot of buzz right now about a ‘massive DDoS attack' targeting the US, complete with scary-looking [graphs]. While it makes for a good headline in these already dramatic times, it's not accurate. The reality is far more boring," Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer of website security company Cloudfare Inc. NET said on Twitter.

T-Mobile Price Action

T-Mobile shares closed 2.3% higher at $104.68 on Monday. The shares were down 0.6% in the after-hours session at $104.01.