T-Mobile Users Around Country Report Problems With Calls, Texts

CHICAGO (CBS) -- T-Mobile users in Chicago and around the country were reporting major problems making calls and sending text messages Monday.

T-Mobile president of technology Neville Ray tweeted that the carrier was experiencing an outage.

Ray tweeted again just after 5 p.m. that the efforts to fix the problem were ongoing, but some calls were completing. He advised people to use alternate services such as WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and Facetime.

CNET reported it was unclear what caused the issue or when it would be resolved. Twitter users reported the outage en masse, with T-Mobile rising to the top spot on trending topics in the U.S. at 3:11 p.m. CT, CNET reported.

Users said the main issue appeared to be calls and texts, while data was working as normal, CNET reported.

CNET reported that down detector, a site where users may report outages, noted issues with all major wireless carriers -- AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

But Verizon reported that its network was not having issues.

"Verizon's network is performing well. We're aware that another carrier is having network issues. Calls to and from that carrier may receive an error message," Verizon said in a statement emailed to CBS 2.

Verizon continued: "We understand downdetector is falsely reporting Verizon network issues. Sites such as Downdetector.com utilize limited crowdsourced data drawn from sample social posts which are often statistically insignificant or factually incorrect. A lot of factors can contribute to a false report on a third-party website … a faulty device, network traffic that slows but doesn't inhibit connections, commercial RF blockers, human error, network issues impacting other carriers and more. These types of sites do not evaluate and confirm the crowd-sourced data that they receive, they simply aggregate it and report it. The result can be faulty reports of network performance interruptions causing wide-spread miscommunication for wireless users."

AT&T spokesman Jim Greer said in a statement: "Our network is operating normally. You might ask other providers, it appears another carrier is having a nationwide issue."