By Roger Cheng
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- T-Mobile USA said Wednesday that it had restored voice, text messaging and data services that left nearly 2 million customers disconnected from its wireless network Tuesday evening.
The carrier, fresh from dealing with a service outage that temporarily wiped out the personal data of its SideKick subscribers, suffered from a service outage that affected roughly 5% of its subscribers across the country. While the problems affected a small percentage of its base, the problems appeared more widespread as users took to the Internet to complain about their lack of service.
It's another public black eye for the Deutsche Telekom AG (DT) unit, which is struggling with poor perception of the quality of its service. The fourth-largest service provider by subscribers has also dealt with slowing growth, as its customers leave for higher end AT&T Inc. (T) or Verizon Wireless for better phones, or move down to the pre-paid carriers for a lower priced service. The carrier recently unveiled a series of new pricing plans in an effort to turn the business around.
The outage began at 5:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday, and at around 1:30 a.m. EST on Wednesday morning, the carrier confirmed that service had been restored.
"We are now investigating the root cause of the incident," said a T-Mobile spokesman.
The latest outage threatens to re-ignite concerns stoked by the SideKick incident, in which Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) accidentally lost personal SideKick data stored in its servers. The company and its SideKick unit, Danger, later restored some of the data, but took a lot of public criticism for the slip-up.
-By Roger Cheng, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2153; roger.cheng@dowjones.com