- Some customers of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon were unable to make calls, text or use data while traveling abroad last week
- All three carriers said they were working with a third party to resolve the issues
- Syniverse said the root cause stemmed from misconfiguration errors at a peering partner outside of its network
The international roaming outage that affected customers of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon last week was resolved by June 29, and Syniverse has vowed to use the experience to prevent future disruptions from happening.
Syniverse, which provides roaming services for all three carriers, said it became aware of an intermittent service disruption on the morning of June 26 for North American mobile phone users traveling overseas or individuals traveling into North America.
The outage meant customers were unable to call friends or family, order a rideshare or use navigation tools – the kinds of things travelers heavily rely on. Some of those who were affected took to social media to report disruptions.
While the carriers pointed to an unnamed third party (Syniverse) as the culprit, Syniverse in turn said the root cause stemmed from misconfiguration errors at “a peering partner outside of our network,” which narrows it down to absolutely no one in particular.
It was not the result of a cyber attack, according to Syniverse.
In any case, the global network became flooded with error messages causing a near infinite loop called a “signaling storm,” Syniverse explained.
“This necessitated a blocking of a very limited number of peering partners who were producing excessive error loops and an upgrade of network capacity. We have now ensured safe performance and brought all peering partners back onto the network with full service restored,” the company said in a statement posted to X.
AT&T announced that it will issue credits for customers who were traveling and impacted during the outage, which lasted from June 26-28. No word yet from T-Mobile or Verizon as to what they plan to do regarding credits.
It’s unknown exactly how many people were affected. Verizon said 70% of its calls and data connections were going through at the time of the outage.
Long-term impact?
For consumers, “it largely doesn’t matter that it was Syniverse’s fault,” said IDC analyst Jason Leigh. “They see it as a carrier issue since that’s who they interact with.”
Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, agreed. Consumers expect their carrier’s service to work and when it doesn’t, they blame the company they write the check to. “To them, it doesn’t matter that their carrier partnered with Syniverse, who has another partner who made the mistake,” he told Fierce.
In the near term, it looks bad for Syniverse, but given these are multi-year contracts that it has with the carriers, the impact should be short-lived – assuming no further issues occur, Leigh said.
Roaming generally works flawlessly, but now and then, there are problems. “Here, it was not a malicious actor but somebody made a mistake,” Entner said.
Because Syniverse works with carriers around the world, the “peering partner” could be any one of them, he said. “Mistakes were made."