Verizon experienced an outage across the U.S. that started soon after 12 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday. The carrier has now apologized to its customers and says the problem is over. Here’s the latest news, Verizon’s advice, and an offer of free doughnuts from Krispy Kreme.
Verizon Outage: The Latest
Verizon said the outage was over soon after 10 p.m. Eastern, meaning it lasted around 10 hours. The company apologized (as reported here on Forbes) and said that it would provide account credits to customers who have been affected.
On a technical note, since many smartphones can also make phone calls over wi-fi, you might have expected that workarounds would come into effect, but as the New York Times reported, this also seemed to be down. “Some customers complained online that their service was briefly restored, only to lose it again,” it commented.
It also quoted Lee W. McKnight, a professor who researches wireless grids, who said the cause, which hasn’t yet been determined, is more likely to be caused by a software configuration problem or human error than a cyberattack. And this issue could be exacerbated by employees not adequately trained in dealing with these issues.
Verizon also had the classic turn-it-off-and-on-again technical advice, suggesting that if users were still having problems, a restart should solve it.
One intriguing intervention came from Krispy Kreme, which commented on the situation on Instagram. “SOS got you down? We can hear you now — and we’re serving up,” it said, and for two hours offered a free glazed doughnut on Wednesday.
Here’s what happened. The carrier acknowledged the outage soon after 1 p.m. Eastern time. “We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience,” Verizon said in a post on X.
Verizon Outage: The Early Indications
Verizon referred to a situation affecting “some customers,” which caused a backlash from users complaining that this minimized the situation. Others, such as the New York Post, described it as “a massive network outage.” An hour later, the company said that it was still working on the issue.
Just before Verizon’s first post, there were more than 173,000 outage reports on Downdetector, though the rate of reports began to slow soon after.
If you use T-Mobile or AT&T, don’t feel too smug, as users of those carriers were also reporting issues, though at far lower numbers — in the low thousands. AT&T even posted a slightly defiant response on X: “Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us…..it’s the other guys. Some things are just out of our hands!”
How Widespread Wss the Verizon Network Outage?
For many of Verizon’s 146 million customers, the bars showing signal strength vanished. Even when bars have reappeared, it’s been unreliable. Some users have seen their signals return and vanish just as quickly.
Areas affected were reported on the East Coast, including New York City, Washington and New Jersey, though not exclusively. The Downdetector outage map “showed that the most disruptions were in major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Ore., and Washington,” the New York Times reported.
The cause is still unclear, and the solution still seems to be some way off, though by 3 p.m. Eastern the number of disruptions reported by Downdetector had dropped to 60,000, so the end may be in sight.
I’ll be reporting on what caused this as soon as it becomes evident and updating this post when new information emerges, so please check back.