Photo by Dante D’Orazio / The Verge

If you’ve been wondering what could knock out one of the United States’ three big cellular carriers’ ability to deliver calls and text messages — and keep it that way for most of an entire day — that pertains to its extensive nationwide outage Monday.

The company issued an apology late Tuesday that you can read in its entirety below, and on Thursday, CTO Neville Ray provided a further explanation you’ll find at the bottom of this post.

The short version, if we’re reading this correctly: a fiber-optic circuit failed, and its backup circuit also failed, which caused a chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through.

The longer version:

June 16th,…

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