Last night, I attended a performance of Star Wars: In Concert. As I arrived at the venue, I saw that my HTC-G1 had no reception. That’s unusual — T-Mobile’s coverage in Atlanta tends to be pretty strong. I met up with my wife and we took our seats. Her cell phone, also on T-Mobile, still had reception. But she noticed that she wasn’t able to send text messages. Something was definitely odd.

As John Williams’ music filled the arena, I couldn’t help worrying about my phone. The last message I saw as I tried everything to check the connection (including removing and replacing the battery and SIM card) said my SIM card wasn’t registered with the network. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I listened to the oppressive opening notes of The Imperial March, looked at the enormous image of Darth Vader staring at us from the massive screen behind the orchestra and began to worry that my phone had turned to the Dark Side.

As it happens, I was one of thousands of customers affected by a service outage. T-Mobile customers across the United States began having trouble with their service. I was one of the lucky ones — by the end of the concert, my service had returned. But some people are still experiencing problems with their phones.

This isn’t great news for T-Mobile. The company is still dealing with the fallout from the Sidekick fiasco last month. If you missed that story, the servers containing Sidekick users’ information, including contact lists and calendars, went down and appeared to delete all the stored data. Since that unfortunate event, Sidekick owners have seen their data return in bits and pieces.

The Sidekick problem wasn’t T-Mobile’s fault. Microsoft owns the servers that hold Sidekick user data. But since T-Mobile is the carrier that provides cell service to the Sidekick handset, it’s natural for people to associate the problem with the company. This latest service outage, which affected T-Mobile customers using a variety of handsets, could weaken customer confidence.

To make matters even worse, now that Sprint and Verizon are offering up smart phones running the Android platform, T-Mobile can no longer lay claim to being the exclusive Android phone carrier in the United States. And out of the largest four cell phone carriers in the United States, T-Mobile brings up the rear.

As a T-Mobile customer, I hope the company bounces back from this setback. I also hope my phone service doesn’t die on me again. I’d hate to be tempted to join the Empire just so I can access my Twitter account.

Learn more about the Force and cell phone service at HowStuffWorks.com:

How Cell Phones Work
How Smartphones Work
How the Death Star Works