Americans touring other parts of the world are facing major mobile connectivity issues due to an international roaming outage. Roaming services are down on all three major US wireless carriers—AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The companies are aware of the issues but don’t seem to have devised a fix yet.
International roaming is down for all major US carriers
Over the past few hours, hundreds of American mobile subscribers have reported issues with international roaming. Posts on Reddit and other online platforms suggest roaming services are completely down for some users, while others are getting intermittent connectivity that lasts a while and then goes away.
The issues aren’t limited to roaming services in any particular country or region. Reports are coming from all corners of the world, with users of all major carriers affected. A Verizon subscriber traveling in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, took to Reddit to recount the horror of lost mobile connectivity in a foreign country.
“Went to the club last night and was separated from my friends with no service, really scary,” they said. Of course, affected users have already contacted their service providers for a solution. In fact, the company may have received hundreds of calls, emails, and social media messages. Some users say they were told to wait for 24 hours.
“Some customers traveling internationally are experiencing service issues,” Verizon said in a statement to Android Authority. Phone calls and data sessions are successfully completing about 70 percent of the time. Our teams are actively working with our roaming provider to resolve the issue.” The firm didn’t specify when the issue might be fixed.
The root cause of the problem is still unknown
As of this writing, the carriers haven’t specified the root cause of the issue. Users are speculating that a mistake while making changes to the way that carriers support legacy data standards (2G and 3G) led to an international roaming outage. Syniverse, the firm that helps carriers in this transition, recently said that carriers are working on this switch.
“Right now, MNOs [mobile network operators] are retiring their 2G and 3G networks to recoup portions of the wireless spectrum and avoid devoting resources to costly maintenance,” Syniverse said. “However, an operator must fully support VoLTE services before shutting down these networks so its subscribers can remain connected while roaming.” It’s unclear whether this is causing the current international roaming outage. We will keep you posted.
2024-06-27 15:04:56