Customers of all three major U.S. cellular carriers – AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon – are dealing with a major international roaming outage. There is speculation that the issue may have been caused by a mistake in a change in the way that carriers support legacy data standards.
Some users report that their service is completely out, while others are experiencing intermittent issues where their 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 have been told that the issue is expected to be resolved in 24 hours.
Some observers say that the issue is being caused by the way the cellular networks support 2G and 3G data connections, which is causing issues with fallback from 4G and 5G services. Syniverse – which works with carriers to help make these transitions – mentioned this work earlier this week.