Update: AT&T customers are being offered a credit – see the end of the piece
A major international roaming outage is causing lost mobile connectivity for Americans around the world. The problem is affecting all three major US carriers – AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Some are speculating that the problem may have been caused by a mistake made during work to change the way that carriers support legacy data standards …
Some users report that their service is completely out, while others describe intermittent issues in which data service comes and goes. There are multiple threads about the issue on Reddit.
“I’m currently in China, and both my work and personal phones’ data roaming stopped working. AT&T is the carrier for both my phones, but I’m seeing other posts for Verizon data roaming outage. is there a widespread issue with data roaming? I can’t find any news on this besides on reddit.”
“I am currently in Egypt and have had no problems with the data roaming until today (I’ve been in Egypt for around a month now) I am not able to connect to any service and I can’t call anyone about it since my calls keep dropping. I tried manually connecting to a service and while there are services listed as available my phone can’t connect I have a Samsung phone and my sister has an iPhone with the same issue.”
“Same is happening to me, but I am in France. Talked with support that says roaming internationally is down..no ETA on fix.”
“There is an International outage and it’s affecting all carriers. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.”
Users who have contacted support are being told that the issue is expected to be resolved in 24 hours.
Some are suggesting that the issue is likely caused by changes being made to the way networks support 2G and 3G, and that this is causing issues with fallback from 4G and 5G services. Syniverse – which works with carriers to help make this transition – referenced this work earlier this week.
Right now, MNOs [mobile network operators] are retiring their 2G and 3G networks to recoup portions of the wireless spectrum and avoid devoting resources to costly maintenance. However, an operator must fully support VoLTE services before shutting down these networks so its subscribers can remain connected while roaming.
Update: AT&T customers to receive a credit
AT&T has announced that both personal and business customers will receive a credit for fees incurred during the outage.
The service disruption for customers traveling internationally has been resolved. We know how important staying connected is and appreciate our customers’ understanding while we collaborated with our roaming connectivity provider to resolve the issue. For our customers who were traveling and impacted, we will issue credits for daily fees during this timeframe (6/26 to 6/28).
The company said that the issue occurred outside of the AT&T network, but did not elaborate on the cause.
We don’t yet know whether T-Mobile and Verizon will take similar action.
