On 26th of June 2024 AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile had a major outage of their service in The EU. This left hundreds of thousands of US tourists without access to cell phone data. The cause was supposedly an outage caused by a third party provider Syniverse.
We were lucky enough to not be affected as our eSIM did not rely on this service from a third party. I can’t imagine the inconvenience of loosing data for a day while traveling! You’d basically be paralyzed with no way to check bus routes, order a taxi or do research 🧐 where to go next on TripAdvisor. Here is the article on The NY Times.
Of course those affected could have bought a 24h eSIM to have data for the duration of the outage. They would have needed access to WIFI to make the purchase and had a compatible phone.
