Verizon customers across the United States experienced widespread service disruptions on Wednesday, with voice calling and mobile data access failing for several hours. The company has not disclosed what caused the outage, but law enforcement sources do not suspect a cyberattack.
ABC reports that a significant network outage struck Verizon on Wednesday, leaving many customers without access to voice and wireless data services for multiple hours. The disruption began around noon Eastern Time and persisted well into the afternoon, affecting customers primarily in major metropolitan areas along the eastern seaboard. The outage seems to be hitting customers in major cities across the country, although other customers report no problems.
The company is only referring to the outage as a “service issue:”
Customers reported seeing an SOS indicator displayed on their smartphones instead of the usual network signal bars, a sign that their devices could not connect to the carrier’s network. The widespread nature of the problem became immediately apparent when even Verizon’s own network status page struggled to load, likely overwhelmed by the volume of customers attempting to check service conditions.
At the peak of the outage, Downdetector reported 180,000 incident reports from users. Given that a relatively small percentage of Verizon customers would actively report an outage to the site dedicated to tracking tech issues, the total number of customers could surpass a million or more.
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 Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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