T-Mobile is making amends for its five-day outage. | Image by NPR
On May 28, T-Mobile Fiber went down for customers across South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. While many had service restored within 36 hours, it took a full five days to get the entire situation under control. Needless to say, that was an eternity in internet years. Customers began wondering whether T-Mobile planned to make up for the blackout, and sure enough, it has.
The payout
T-Mobile is compensating customers for the fiber outage. | Image by Reddit user macb00kemdanno
T-Mobile has started issuing bill credits for the T-Fiber outage, alongside emails apologizing for the experience and explaining what went awry.
A botched firmware update knocked the network flat, and T-Mobile admits that restoring service took far longer than it should have. To reassure nervous customers, the company claims it has reviewed its testing mechanisms to prevent something like this from happening again.
Varying amounts
As is often the case with outage compensation, customers are receiving different amounts based on their circumstances. For now, the range seems to be $10 to $75, with customers who relied on the connection for work and had to spend extra for alternative arrangements receiving the most.
What do you do when your network goes down?
Chaos
While T-Mobilepoked fun at Verizon when the latter's network went down earlier this year, the truth is that no company is outage-proof.
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This particular outage could be traced back to Lumos, a fiber company T-Mobile acquired last year to expand its footprint. Last week's outage only affected Lumos markets, and all customers in those areas were impacted.
Apparently, Lumos and other recently acquired fiber companies still operate somewhat independently, relying on their original engineers to maintain the infrastructure.
Not having its own fiber infrastructure could be the reason it took T-Mobile so long to get to the bottom of the problem and iron it out. It also took nearly 12 hours to draft an official response.
The outage was unique in that the equipment showed an active connection, but many websites and services wouldn't load properly. Many customers continued having difficulties after T-Mobile said it had addressed the problem.
The right move
Between the slow repair times and confusing status updates, customers were understandably frustrated.
T-Mobile did the sensible thing by rolling out credits. After all, T-Fiber is still in its infancy, and incidents like these could cause customers to consider alternatives.
With T-Mobile aggressively acquiring companies like GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband to double its fiber passings to two million, the last thing it needs is early adopters jumping ship to the competition, especially when the rivals are trying so hard.
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Anam Hamid is a computer scientist turned tech journalist who has a keen interest in the tech world, with a particular focus on smartphones and tablets. She has previously written for Android Headlines and has also been a ghostwriter for several tech and car publications. Anam is not a tech hoarder and believes in using her gadgets for as long as possible. She is concerned about smartphone addiction and its impact on future generations, but she also appreciates the convenience that phones have brought into our lives. Anam is excited about technological advancements like folding screens and under-display sensors, and she often wonders about the future of technology. She values the overall experience of a device more than its individual specs and admires companies that deliver durable, high-quality products. In her free time, Anam enjoys reading, scrolling through Reddit and Instagram, and occasionally refreshing her programming skills through tutorials.
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