Verizon mentioned it has resolved an hours-long outage that is believed to have left tens of hundreds of US prospects without entry to voice and data services for a lot of Wednesday.
“Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly
sorry,” a Verizon spokesperson mentioned in a press release to NCS. “They expect more from us.”
The announcement got here round 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, many hours after subject studies emerged in main cities from New York to Dallas early Wednesday afternoon by Downdetector, a web site that tracks user-submitted studies of outages.
The outage left many without the capacity to make phone calls, ship textual content messages or use data. Some on social media reported their telephones being caught in SOS mode or shedding entry to service.
Verizon mentioned it plans to supply account credit to these affected and will share extra particulars quickly.
Downdetector instructed NCS over e mail on Wednesday afternoon that greater than 1 million subject studies associated to the outage had been generated inside the final 24 hours. At its peak, greater than 178,000 studies have been filed inside a 15-minute window.
Verizon has not revealed the trigger behind the outage.
The outage is one among a number of high-profile tech outages in the previous 12 months that have interrupted each day life for hundreds, together with an Amazon Web Services subject that took down most of the net in October. In 2024, a widespread AT&T outage left prospects throughout the United States without service and prompted a Federal Communications Commission investigation.
Among the Verizon subject studies submitted to Downdetector on Wednesday, 59% cited points associated to “mobile phone failure,” whereas 34% talked about a “loss of signal.”
Customers in New York City, Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston and Dallas appeared to have been most impacted, based on the web site’s data.
Verizon mentioned customers who’re nonetheless experiencing points ought to restart their units to reconnect to the community.
Users additionally reported issues with AT&T and T-Mobile service on Downdetector, though spokespeople for each networks mentioned their services are working usually. Customers could expertise service points when attempting to contact these on Verizon.
“T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected,” T-Mobile mentioned in a remark to NCS. “However, due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.”
Jack Burbank, a senior member of the technical group IEEE and vp of superior communication applied sciences at Sabre Systems, mentioned over e mail that a variety of causes might end in disruptions like this, together with “faulty configuration changes” or “software updates gone wrong.”
When cell service is unavailable, some carriers, together with Verizon, help the capacity to make calls over the web by a characteristic known as Wi-Fi calling. To be certain that Wi-Fi calling is enabled on an iPhone, open the settings menu, faucet the mobile possibility and select Wi-Fi calling. The directions are comparable for Android: Choose the calls possibility in the settings menu and choose Wi-Fi calling.
Phones from Apple, Google and Samsung on Verizon’s community additionally help satellite tv for pc textual content messaging, which make it attainable to ship texts even without mobile or Wi-Fi service. But satellite tv for pc indicators could be blocked by buildings or bushes, making it tough to attach if a person isn’t in an open area.
This story has been up to date with extra particulars.