T-Mobile service interruption Tuesday night impacts over 1.5 million customers

T-Mobile is claiming that it has fixed a Tuesday night service outage that impacted about 5 percent of its customers. The outage started around 5pm EST, and appeared to have different effects on different devices and geographies. My personal Motorola CLIQ had no SMS or voice service, but still had data services. Two of our UMA^(INFO) connected BlackBerry Curve phones had limited internet connectivity, but no voice or text messaging support. Others on the web reported that they had no data at all. The company posted the following notice to its Twitter account early Tuesday evening:

"All - We're aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible."

At 1:25am EST on Wednesday morning the company posted to its support forums that the outage had been dealt with and that service had been fully restored to all customers:

"T-Mobile confirms it has fully restored voice and text/picture messaging services for customers affected by intermittent service disruptions on Tuesday. About five percent of our customers across various geographies were affected for much of Tuesday evening, and by late Tuesday PST their service was restored. Our sole focus has been restoring full services for all customers; we are now investigating the root cause of the incident. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers."

So far T-Mobile USA has not said what the root cause of the outage was. It has been a rough few weeks for the country's fourth largest carrier, as it just had to endure a massive week-long T-Mobile Sidekick service outage that left users expecting to lose their personal data. T-Mobile and its partner, Microsoft, did eventually recover the lost data.