Not a single chirp from Cricket this evening as outage takes service out for hours (update)

Update (10am EST, 6/4): So it seems that while I was fortunate enough to get service back after only 4 to 5 hours, many were not so lucky. Many people in the comments seem to have service back this morning, but there are still some that stranded without service — going on 17 hours+ in some areas.

What’s even worse is that communication from Cricket has been next to nothing, with basically just the PR mantra of “We’re aware. We’re working to fix it”, as their only response. There also seems to be a ton of inconsistency to who has service, and who doesn’t. For example, some of my family found that service was out for them for under an hour, others didn’t have an outage at all. I ended up without service for nearly six hours. So don’t be surprised if one of your family members has service but you still don’t.

For those that aren’t finding service, try resetting your phone if you haven’t already, as this has corrected the issue for at least few folks this morning.

As a bit of a side note, Cricket may be the only network affected to this great of a scale, but visiting DownDetector shows that other networks including Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T also suffered an increase in reports of service outage. Again, these other networks didn’t have nearly as many reports of outages as Cricket, but still makes you wonder what happened yesterday. 

Are you still without service on Cricket? Do you use another network, and did you have any problems connecting at all yesterday? Let us know down in the ever-growing comment section.

Original (12PM EST, 6/4):

Up until about 5PM EST, today was like any other day, but then something happened that instantly changed the tone of my entire evening. There was a service outage for my carrier, Cricket Wireless.

Having service out for a few hours isn’t a big deal, right? No, it wouldn’t have been, but unfortunately this turned out to be more like a 4 to 5 hour ordeal. On the brightside, I learned a lot about myself in those 5 to 6 hours, like the fact that I really rely a bit too much on my phone for everything from looking stuff up, to conducting business, socializing, and more. So thanks for that life lesson, Cricket.

• Best Cricket phones

As for what happened to bring Cricket Wireless down in the first place? Good question. At least at the time of this writing, Cricket has yet to officially issue a statement on what went wrong, only that they were working to fix it. At least in my area, everything seems to be working a-okay now, though some areas might still be having trouble.

For those that don’t know, Cricket is a US MVNO that is owned by AT&T and operated off AT&T’s network. Oddly enough, AT&T didn’t seem to have the same level of outages as Cricket, though there were at least a few sporadic reports of issues by AT&T customers as well. A few issues doesn’t begin to compare to what happened with Cricket, however. According to several reports, Cricket service was pretty much non-existent for right around five hours.

As you can imagine, many customers are quite angry. Considering I convinced many family members to switch to Cricket over the last year or so, I also received a few semi-miffed messages from family members. Personally, I understand that outages happen, though it is disappointing that Cricket hasn’t been more transparent about what happened or what steps it was taking to fix things.

For my part, as long as this remains a one-time drama, I’ll keep with Cricket as the network has been really good to me otherwise in the year or so I’ve been using it. Any other Cricket customers out there? How do you feel about this outage, and did it bother you enough to make you start shopping for a new carrier? Any AT&T customers affected this evening? Let us know your thoughts about the situation in the comments below.