FCC: Staff Report on T-Mobile Outage on June 15 2020

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

FCC Issues Staff Report On T-Mobile Outage

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-staff-report-t-mobile-outage-0


The outage was initially caused by an equipment failure and then 
exacerbated by a network routing misconfiguration that occurred when 
T-Mobile introduced a new router into its network. In addition, the outage 
was magnified by a software flaw in T-Mobile’s network that had been 
latent for months and interfered with customers’ ability to initiate or 
receive voice calls during the outage.


[...]
44. While fiber link failures are common, PSHSB finds that these steps, 
taken together, will reduce the likelihood that a fiber link failure could 
result in the recurrence of a similar event in TMobile’s network because 
traffic would be routed to an alternative path that could handle it. 
Moreover, if such an event recurred on T-Mobile’s network, it would not 
cause such a large service disruption because T-Mobile would have improved 
its networks’ ability to manage congestion in the case of a similar event
and would have increased network capacity to maintain the network in a 
working state even with an increased volume of traffic.