T-Mobile mops up after another embarrassing outage

First there was last month's Sidekick data outage, and now a good-sized chunk of T-Mobile subscribers are furious after their phones went dead for eight hours Tuesday. Not good.

T-Mobile issued a statement on its official support forum early this morning apologizing for the outage, which it said affected about 5 percent of its subscribers "across various geographies."

"T-Mobile confirms it has fully restored voice and text-picture messaging service" for those hit by the "intermittent" outage, the statement (posted at 1:27 a.m. ET Wednesday) reads. "Our sole focus has been restoring full services for all customers; we are now investigating the root cause of the incident."

But despite T-Mobile's claim that voice and data service were back online, users on T-Mobile's support forums were still complaining Wednesday morning that their phones were dead.

"Still having issues in NH, everyone's phone seems to be working but mine," one user wrote. "Is anyone else in the Manchester area still having issues because right now I'm about done with T-Mobile."

From another subscriber: "I have had it with T-Mobile's constant excuses for providing inferior service ... I will be canceling my 3 lines of service as a result of this most recent problem, and I encourage others to do the same."

It's still not clear exactly how many T-Mobile customers were affected by Tuesday's outage. T-Mobile estimates that as many as 5 percent of its subscribers lost voice and data service, which—as PC World points out—comes out to about 1.7 million chatters.

The latest outage comes a month after T-Mobile Sidekick users coast-to-coast lost data access (although not voice calls or text messaging) for the better part of a week.

To be fair, the Sidekick data meltdown was traced to servers managed by Microsoft-owned Danger, the developer of the Sidekick, and not T-Mobile's cellular network.

But with T-Mobile still busy mending fences with Sidekick users, many of whom couldn't access their contacts or data services for many days after the unwelcome October surprise, this new outrage couldn't have come at a worse time for the "Stick Together" network.

So, how many of you T-Mobile subscribers out there were affected by the outage? Anyone still having problems? And will you stick with T-Mobile, or are you thinking of crossing the wireless street?

Related:
T-Mobile USA Restores Voice, Data Services After Disruption [PC World]