Verizon is experiencing an outage across the U.S. that started soon after 12 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday. If you’re seeing SOS instead of signal bars, it’s not just you. Here’s the latest news.
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: What We Know So Far
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 Is 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. Forbes is also covering this story here.