T-Mobile subscribers dealt with issues Friday morning as the carrier was improving its network

If you're a T-Mobile subscriber, Friday morning you might have realized that something was going on with the carrier's network. According to DownDetector, the number of complaints it received about the nation's second-largest wireless provider having an issue soared 100 fold with 42 submissions at 4:41 am ET soaring to a peak of 4,748 exactly two hours later. 

A whopping 75% said that they could not get confirmation that an SMS text that they sent had been received although some of them did make it to the recipient. 19% of those reporting to DownDetector about the outage said that they could not send or receive phone calls, and 6% had issues with their 5G home internet.

At 1:26 pm ET, the number of new reports had dried up significantly to 96. The Mobile Report received a statement from T-Mobile that said, "We resolved an issue that caused some customers to experience intermittent issues with texting and calling for a short period overnight. This was related to planned work on our network. We apologize for any inconvenience."

The problems experienced by T-Mobile customers affected subscribers in major cities including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Tampa, Columbus, and Charlotte. Making matters worse, T-Mobile's support phone number for subscribers, 611, also was not working.

As you might expect, MVNOs using T-Mobile's networks also were affected by the outage which, as we already pointed out, was due to planned maintenance on the carrier's network. Not being a T-Mobile subscriber, I was wondering whether T-Mobile subscribers received any advanced notification that the carrier was doing work on the network that could impact service on Friday morning. It would be similar to signs put up on a highway that warn drivers to expect certain lanes to be closed on a specific day due to construction.

The good news is that the issues started going away pretty early in the day with reports stating that service started to return to normal at 9:40 am ET.