T-Mobile Outage, Flooding in Washington State

T-Mobile Struggles With Flooding

Bothell, Washington data center swamped

Tuesday Dec 04 2007

by Karl

Severe flooding in the Pacific Northwest has swamped a T-Mobile data center in Bothell, Washington, impacting customer support, activiations, and some website functions. Several users have written in directing our attention to stories at both the Boy Genius Report and Data Center Knowledge.

An employee posts his account:

The report is correct - The main data center is flooded right now, so we only have email and our coverage/outage map. No accounts can be accessed due to the systems being out, so this can and will affect short codes such as 646, 225, the website and just about every system. It started around 7:30pm EST and was still happening when I left around 2:00 am EST. They were hoping to at least get read only systems online in the next few hours, so that we can at least do a little for the customers. Hopefully it will be back soon - Any techies have a clue how long it takes to dry out servers and get them back online - That should give a better idea on timelines.Calling T-Mobile's customer care line (1-800-937-8997) results in a recorded message telling you that the company can't access your account information.

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FYI: My own personal Blackberry service on T-Mobile has been out since 5pm Monday evening. It's now 5pm Tuesday evening and I'm getting a dribble of intermittent emails.

Terrible to hear about the awful flooding and weather. Interesting that there isn't better redundancy for a worldwide mobile company. A little perplexing... they must be losing millions and millions since people can't pay their bills, can't setup new phones, make service changes, purchases, etc... major bummer for t-mobile!