According to multiple sources, thousands of T-Mobile iPhone users have been suffering through some type of network problem on Thursday. The exact issue has not been identified yet, but many users have been seeing their iPhones restart multiple times in a row or even having to deal with well-known “Blue Screen of Death” right in the middle of sending a text.
Some impacted users are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death for just a moment before their devices restart, and it appears most people who are suffering from problems first began having problems last night or this earlier this morning.
Industry analysts point out this is at least the second time iPhone owners have had to with the dreaded blue screen. Back in 2013, a number of Phone 5s users got to enjoy a glimpse of the famous blue screen after they used a number of popular apps. That problem was cleared up within a day or so.
T-Mobile has not released an official statement on the current network problems to date.
More on T-Mobile iPhone outages
MacRumors is reporting that “known devices with problems include the iPhone 6 Plus, the iPhone 6, and the iPhone 5s, with restarts happening at 10 to 30 minute intervals. Multiple versions of iOS 8 appear to be affected, including iOS 8.1 and iOS 8.3.”
The cause of the problem remains unknown. It’s possible T-Mobile pushed a new carrier update that’s creating the issues, but a reddit user who interacted with T-Mobile’s support staff noted it seemed like T-Mobile thought a memory problem might be behind the restarts. “The sense I got from the technician is that a) they suspect memory problems, and b) they’re getting a lot of calls about it,” the reddit user wrote.
Hard reset or disabling Wi-Fi seems to fix the problem in most cases
Apparently, many users have been able to cure the problem with a hard reset, and that is the solution that T-Mobile is currently recommending to customers who call into their support center. If a restart does not do the trick, T-Mobile is telling customers to delete all old text messages and then do a factory restore from iTunes.
A number of users are also reporting that disabling Wi-Fi Calling for at least four or five minutes before switching it back on also seems to solve the problem in the vast majority of cases.
Quotes from impacted T-Mobile customers
Another reddit user describes his experiences with his iPhone this morning: “So this morning my iPhone 6 (4 months old) started just randomly restarting itself every 20-30 minutes or so,” one Reddit user wrote on Wednesday. “I wasn’t even using it most of the time, it was in my pocket at work (could tell because of lock screen that indicated I needed to enter my pin after a restart as opposed to finger ID). At one point I was texting my SO about it, the screen turned blue for maybe 2 seconds and it restarted.”
The person also noted the same thing started happening to his significant other’s phone, and they are both on T-Mobile.
