Virgin Mobile experiencing text, data outage

A nationwide outage has left Virgin Mobile customers in the U.S. without text or data services.

The company confirmed the disruption in a tweet this afternoon and said that engineers were working on the issue but did not give any indication what caused the outage or when it is expected to be resolved.

We're currently experiencing a national data & text messaging outage. Our engineers are working to resolve it. Thank you for your patience.

— Virgin Mobile USA (@virginmobileus) March 20, 2012

Virgin Mobile is an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator that leases network capacity from parent Sprint Nextel and resells the service to customers. However, Sprint customers appeared to be unaffected by the outage.

Its prepaid service is targeted toward teenagers and people with poor credit. The company recently announced that it would begin throttling data speeds for users who exceed 2.5GB a month, starting on Friday. However, Virgin Mobile said throttling would not affect texting or calling abilities and that data speeds would return to normal once the next plan month starts.