Extremely long (multiple hours) hold times during the past week --- why?

I hate to say it, but what do you expect? 100% of T-Mobile’s customer service is offshored (and I don’t mean to single them out; the same is true of AT&T, Verizon, UPS, FedEx, your credit company, the “card services” department of your heretofore “local” credit union, etc., etc.).

In defense of offshoring and understaffing, when we are paying, say, $50/month for T-Mobile home Internet, or about $125/month for typical postpaid cell phone service, the company loses money the minute a human -- even someone earning 60¢ an hour in the Philippine call center -- answers the phone. (If T-Mobile still had US customer service staff, their wages would be the main factor, but with offshoring, it's the overhead -- the high-volume international telecommunications capacity, the ticketing system, the call distribution hardware, the management, the profit for the contractor, the cost of the stateside procurement department that writes contracts with offshore call center vendors, etc.)

Now, a better company would have more reliable systems and services, so calling customer service wouldn’t be a weekly or monthly or even an annual activity.

But beyond that, we all want to talk to real, fully-empowered corporate employees in the US, and we are not willing to pay the cost of quality customer support.

If there were an option to pay a few dollars a minute for premium support by real people here in the US, I would happily do so. It's the combination of lousy underlying services from T-Mobile and our own price sensitivity that explains why we have to wait for hours to talk to a Third-World temporary call center worker who can only read from a script, and lacks the knowledge, as well as the authority, to actually do anything.