Carrier T-Mobile suffered a major network outage in Germany yesterday afternoon. Millions of customers could not use their cell phones for about 3 hours. T-Mobile is the exclusive Apple partner for the iPhone in Germany.
The outage affected SMS and voice. T-Mobile issued (pdf German) an explanation and apology for the outage yesterday night blaming a software error in the Home Location Register servers.
Just imagine if AT&T had an outage for 3 hours. That is right T-Mobile is getting the heat from the press. German Bild already found customers who needed cell phone service "badly" in these 3 hours. Hey, life was going on before there where cell phones too. Of course if you need to call 911 and there is an outage that sucks big time.

Update: T-Mobile will offer free SMS messages (unlimited) all day Sunday to make up for the outage.