T-Mobile restores service after thousands hit by outages around nation

Deschutes 911 says only one, non-emergency call could not be returned

BEND, Ore. (KTVZ)-- T-Mobile resolved cellphone outages Monday night, but not before thousands of customers were affected, including some in Central Oregon.

On Monday, many T-Mobile customers experienced cellular issues and had difficulty operating their phones.

Downdetector, a company that monitors outages of technology services, received many thousands of calls related to cellphone outages by noon Monday from T-Mobile customers.

Downdetector representative Adriane Blum told KTVZ, "The US carrier that we have received the most user reports about in the past few days is T-Mobile. The peak of consumer reports about T-Mobile was around noon PST yesterday (Monday), with 113,980 consumer reports to Downdetector during the peak."

News Channel 21 followed up with Deschutes County 911 dispatch on whether their calls were affected significantly. Operations Manager Chris Perry said T-Mobile reached out Monday to inform them of a network issue that could affect location data and incoming calls.

Perry said there was only one incident in which an officer was unable to return a call to a T-Mobile customer, but it was a non-emergency call.

"Outages are significant for us -- this outage may have affected cellular location, so we may have gotten a voice call and was unable to speak to the caller," Perry said. "We wouldn't have had their automated location so that would've had a significant affect.

"Though that didn't happen in this case, we rely on that technology to get help to the right place if we're unable to get in contact with the caller, so it's a thing we monitor pretty closely."

Perry said T-Mobile informed them around 10 p.m. Monday that the outage had been resolved, but so far, no explanation has been given on what caused it.