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Major Google Fi outage prevented people from making or receiving calls

Major Google Fi outage prevented people from making or receiving calls

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The worst kind of problem for a phone service provider

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google Fi suffered the worst kind of outage for a phone provider on Monday: some customers were completely unable to place or receive phone calls through the service. Google advised customers that it was aware of the situation, and the Fi team said it was “actively working on a fix.” The outage, which appeared to affect Fi subscribers nationwide, was resolved by around 2:30PM ET on Monday. “Thank you for your patience and sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused,” the Fi team said on its forum.

Complaints about the outage were rampant on Twitter. During the downtime, Google encouraged users to route their calls through the Hangouts Dialer as a temporary workaround. But some customers on the Fi forums weren’t having it and threatened to completely cancel their service after being left without phone calls during work or while traveling. Phone provider outages can often draw the scrutiny of the FCC since they can prevent people from reaching 911 and other emergency services.

Today’s issue comes only a day after Google Cloud suffered extensive problems that led to key Google apps like Gmail and YouTube being unavailable.

Update June 3rd 3:00PM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Google Fi has restored phone calls.