freitasm:

richms: What can we call it...

The reality is that at any point in time on a cell network one or more cells will be down for a reason or another (update, reconfiguration, fault, power, etc) and this is considered during the design of the network.

In an ideal world some sites overlap. However some cell sites may be overloaded if the failing site has a lot of connected cell phones.

Obviously "outage" is the lack of service - I would call a single cell site down an "outage". But it seems the word has been banned from some PR circles and they demand the use of "outage" now only for epic failures, let's say "XT size" failures. Otherwise not all networks would be "reliable", right?