T-Mobile outage hits Houston and Harris County, thousands lose service

T-Mobile customers across Houston and Harris County lost cellular and data service Sunday as outage reports on Downdetector surged past 61,000 by 4:28 p.m. CDT. The disruption hit phone connections, signal, internet, texting, email, T-Mobile apps and TV streaming, leaving residents with no clear timeline for when service would come back.

By 5 p.m. ET, more than 64,000 outage reports had been logged, showing the problem stretching far beyond isolated dead spots. The complaints centered on mobile service, which is especially disruptive in a city where many people rely on a single phone for work messages, school apps, banking alerts and everyday calls.

Anyone using T-Mobile for remote work or school should move immediately to Wi-Fi, whether at home, a workplace, a library or another safe hotspot, and keep files saved offline until the network stabilizes. For urgent calls, including 911, a charged backup phone or a landline is the safer fallback if the T-Mobile line will not connect.

A Facebook post circulating locally blamed a fiber cut, but that explanation was not independently verified. T-Mobile has faced Houston network strain before: in May 2024, the carrier said it was restoring network sites hit by commercial power outages after storms and that its Community Support team would provide Wi-Fi, device charging and charging supplies at the Woodland Community Center and the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center.

The outage also revived a larger concern for Harris County customers who depend on one carrier for nearly everything. In 2021, T-Mobile agreed to a $19.5 million settlement over its 2020 911 outage, a reminder that even brief wireless failures can quickly become public-safety problems as well as communications headaches.