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.

In light of this DDoS attack, your reminder that @realDonaldTrump eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position at the NSC in 2018. And in 2019 at least a dozen high-level officials resigned from cybersecurity mission established under Obama. https://t.co/ocKc2Mzdoz https://t.co/TfpRRll2MO

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 15, 2020

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.

This site show a random sample of global DDoS traffic badly plotted on a world map. It does not indicate an attack against the US, it lacks context to make any inferences at all (other than DDoS attacks are happening all day every day). pic.twitter.com/8H9PqlIjbd

— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) June 15, 2020

"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.