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On Wednesday, Verizon customers across the United States faced a significant service disruption, leaving many unable to make voice calls or access mobile data for several hours. Despite the widespread impact, the telecommunications giant has yet to reveal the cause behind this outage. Authorities, however, have indicated that there is no suspicion of a cyberattack.
Reports from ABC highlighted that the outage, which began around noon Eastern Time, persisted well into the afternoon. It primarily affected users in major cities along the eastern seaboard, although customers in other metropolitan areas across the country also experienced issues. Interestingly, some Verizon users reported no service interruptions at all, underscoring the inconsistency of the disruption.
Verizon referred to the incident simply as a “service issue,” as customers experienced their smartphones displaying an SOS signal instead of the usual network bars. This indicated that their devices were struggling to connect to Verizon’s network. The severity of the problem was apparent when Verizon’s network status page became slow to load, likely due to the overwhelming number of users seeking updates on the service conditions.
During the height of the outage, Downdetector, a site known for tracking technical issues, recorded an alarming 180,000 incident reports from users. Given that only a fraction of affected individuals would report issues, the actual number of impacted customers could easily exceed a million.
Feedback from users revealed that the outage predominantly affected voice calling and mobile data services, while text messaging seemed to remain operational for some. This inconsistency in text message delivery suggested that different parts of Verizon’s network were impacted to varying extents.
According to reports from affected users, the outage primarily impacted voice calling capabilities and wireless data connections. However, text messaging services appeared to continue functioning normally for at least some subscribers during the disruption. The inconsistent nature of text message delivery suggested the outage affected different network components in varying degrees.
Geographic data from DownDetector indicated the service disruption was concentrated in major urban centers throughout the eastern United States. The cities experiencing the highest concentration of problems included Boston, New York, and Washington DC. Additional trouble spots were identified in Chicago on the eastern edge of the Midwest, as well as on the West Coast in San Francisco and Los Angeles, suggesting the outage had nationwide implications despite its eastern concentration.
As the afternoon progressed, reports on DownDetector began declining from their peak levels, though thousands of customers continued experiencing service problems. By 3:47 p.m. ET, the platform was still receiving over 55,000 outage reports, indicating the problem remained far from resolved for a substantial portion of the customer base.
By 4:52 p.m. Eastern, the outage had persisted for approximately four hours, approaching the duration of a previous major service disruption the company experienced in 2024. Similar to that earlier incident, Verizon had not disclosed the root cause of the current network problems. The company’s silence on technical details suggested engineers were still investigating the underlying issue while simultaneously working to restore service.
Both of Verizon’s major competitors took the opportunity to reassure their own customers during the incident. T-Mobile posted on social media that its network was operating normally and as expected. AT&T adopted a more pointed approach, telling its customers that any connection problems they might be experiencing were not attributable to AT&T’s infrastructure but rather to other providers, an apparent reference to the Verizon outage.
Read more at ABC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for – News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
