T-Mobile service disrupted nationwide for calls, text

T-Mobile subscribers are having problems sending text messages and receiving phone calls following a nationwide system outage, though the company said late Tuesday that only about 5 percent of customers were still without service Tuesday evening.

The wireless carrier said the outage began at about 5:30 p.m. ET. David Beigie, a T-Mobile spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement to the Associated Press that the company is "making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers."

Beigie did not say how widespread the problems were earlier in the day. In a previous e-mail he described the disruption as "intermittent."

On online mobile-phone message boards, people from Atlanta to Los Angeles described problems sending and receiving text messages and placing and receiving calls.

T-Mobile's official Twitter account says the company is aware of the disruption and has sent teams out to fix it.

This could be the second black eye for T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, in less than a month. In October, a server failure caused customers with Sidekick-brand phones to lose much of their data.

The outage quickly become a trending topic on social media site Twitter, with T-Mobile customers trying to confirm the disruption and venting frustration at the company.

There was no word on the source of the problem from the company, nor when service might be completely restored. Calls placed to the cell phones of several T-Mobile representatives could not be connected.