SEATTLE (AP) -- T-Mobile USA Inc. said about 5 percent of its subscribers are still having problems with its phone and data services as of Tuesday evening.

The wireless carrier said the outage began at about 5:30 p.m. ET. David Beigie, a T-Mobile spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement that the company is "making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers."

Beigie did not say how widespread the problems were earlier in the day. In a previous e-mail he described the disruption as "intermittent."

On online mobile-phone message boards, people from Atlanta to Los Angeles described problems sending and receiving text messages and placing and receiving calls. On Twitter, where people post short messages, "T-Mobile" is at the top of a list of increasingly buzzed-about subjects.

Calls placed to the cell phones of several T-Mobile representatives could not be connected.

The outage could turn into the second black eye for T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, in less than a month. In October, a server failure caused customers with Sidekick-brand phones to lose much of their data.

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