T-Mobile has acknowledged what appeared to be a widespread outage of its cell-phone service that took place late on Tuesday. By about 9:30 PM ET, however, the company said that problems were confined to about 5 percent of users.

T-Mobile has acknowledged what appeared to be a widespread outage of its cell-phone service that took place late on Tuesday.

By about 9:30 PM ET, however, the company said that problems were confined to about 5 percent of users. Outraged customers nevertheless took to Twitter, where a T-Mobile account had previously acknowledged the outage and said the company was working on the issue.

"We're making good progress restoring voice and messaging service to affected customers," a T-Mobile spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. "At this time, approximately 5 percent of T-Mobile customers are experiencing service disruptions. Issues began at approximately 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. Our rapid response team is working continuously to fully resolve this disruption. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers."

T-Mobile did not say how many users in total had been affected by the outages.

T-Mobile appeared to make the first acknowledgments via Twitter earlier Tuesday.

"All  We're aware of the current service disruption," the company said. "Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible."

"We will provide further updates as more information is available," T-Mobile added.

T-Mobile was also the victim of another major outage on Oct. 11, when that data stored on the T-Mobile Sidekick phone could be lost for good, after a series of cascading server failures. Microsoft and Danger said later that .

Of course, the pair of outages made for some irate users. In fact, at pres time it was difficult to find tweets that didn't contain profanity. "The 4 people that I have been trying to talk to all day have t-mobile," "we_wereinfinite" wrote. "No wonder why I haven't heard back from them."

"T-Mobile is down in the ENTIRE nation," "skr3wballz" wrote. "It's either no text, no voice, or neither. I can smell the free month of service."

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 7:15 PM PT with additional comments from T-Mobile.