FCC Seeks Comment on Effects of June 15 T-Mobile Outage

Tue Jun 23 18:07:55 UTC 2020

FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Seeks Comment on Effects of 
June 15, 2020 T-Mobile Outage on Public Safety Entities, Government 
Entities, and Consumers

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-seeks-comment-effects-june-15-t-mobile-outage

>From T-Mobile's statement:
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/update-for-customers-on-network-issues

"The trigger event is known to be a leased fiber circuit failure from a 
third party provider in the Southeast. This is something that happens on 
every mobile network, so we’ve worked with our vendors to build redundancy 
and resiliency to make sure that these types of circuit failures don’t 
affect customers. This redundancy failed us and resulted in an overload 
situation that was then compounded by other factors. This overload 
resulted in an IP traffic storm that spread from the Southeast to create 
significant capacity issues across the IMS (IP multimedia Subsystem) core 
network that supports VoLTE calls."

Other notable national telecommunication failures

AT&T - January 15 1990, AT&T Long Distance Network Collapse

MCI Worldcom - August 1999, Multi-day frame-relay network failure

Centurylink - December 27, 2018, 37-hour nationwide outage