T-Mobile shows signs of being down while iMessage went out Thursday

According to DownDetector, the nation's second-largest wireless provider, T-Mobile, could be having problems. At 4:01 pm EDT, 61 complaints had been submitted to the site from T-Mobile customers. By 6:16 pm, the number of complaints had soared to 5,157. The number has declined since then to 217 complaints which is still above the baseline of 55. 

Other data showed that 48% of the T-Mobile subscribers reporting to DownDetector can't send or receive texts, and 36% are not able to use their mobile phones over the T-Mobile network. 16% of the submissions complained that their T-Mobile 5G Home Internet isn't working. Cities where service is down include Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, New York City, Shawnee, Las Vegas, and Brooklyn.

One T-Mobile subscriber wrote on the Down Detector website, "T-Mobile, another day of OFF & ON home internet service in Rosemount, MN more OFF than on. This has been going at least the last 5 hours."

Also suffering from an issue today was Apple's popular messaging platform, iMessage. Officially, the whole outage took just 46 minutes from 5:49 pm EDT to 6:35 pm EDT so it's quite likely that you didn't even notice that iMessage had stopped working. On DownDetector, complaints soared to 14,760 by 6:15 pm EDT and while 75% couldn't send an iMessage, 21% wrote that they couldn't receive one. 4% said that the service was running too slowly.

Many iPhone users wrote about the iMessage outage on DownDetector. "Clearly it's time we called Apple and said 'our iMessage isn't working' as that's the only way they know of issues..is users reporting directly to Apple support," said one. Some noted that with iMessage not working, SMS text messages could still be sent but without goodies like end-to-end encryption, high-quality images, read receipts, typing indicators, and more. Next time iMessages goes down, check to see what it says in the text field. If it says, Text Message, you can still send an SMS.