T-Mobile outage affects other wireless carriers

T-Mobile US Inc. is grappling with a major service outage affecting thousands of customers in several states and is working to fix the problem, according to network chief Neville Ray.

The company said it hopes to have the service restored soon. The problem comes a few months after T-Mobile acquired Sprint Corp. and became the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier in terms of regular monthly subscribers.

“Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country,” Ray wrote in a tweet. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly.”

Because of T-Mobile’s network problems, callers with other service providers were having trouble connecting to T-Mobile customers, giving an impression that other carriers were also experiencing disruptions.

On Twitter, claims that the disruption was the result of a major distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, by a nation-state actor went viral, sending “DDoS” into the list of top trending terms in the U.S.

Representatives for AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. said their networks were performing well.