T-Mobile explains why its network went down hard, claims only a fifth of calls were lost

If you’ve been wondering what could knock out one of the United States’ three big cellular carriers’ ability to deliver calls and text messages — and keep it that way for most of an entire day — T-Mobile now has a partial answer that pertains to its extensive nationwide outage Monday.

The company issued an apology late Tuesday that you can read in its entirety below, and on Thursday, CTO Neville Ray provided a further explanation you’ll find at the bottom of this post.

The short version, if we’re reading this correctly: a fiber-optic circuit failed, and its backup circuit also failed, which caused a chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through.

The longer version:

June 16th,...

Continue reading…