A Verizon network outage impacted customers across the United States on Monday, and the carrier has not yet publicly identified a cause.
The outage reports extended beyond the known outages caused by Hurricane Helene in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. According to customer-reported issues via DownDector, provided by Ookla, reports of problems from Verizon users began spiking mid-morning Eastern Time on Monday across more than a dozen states from California to New York, with 1.6 million reports collected.
Ookla said that the DownDetector reports were most concentrated in Chicago, Illinois; Phoenix, Arizona; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington. Each of those metro areas had more than 20,000 customer reports of service issues.
Verizon confirmed that it was aware of a network issue in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, at 11:48 a.m. ET on Monday. Multiple users on X commented to the carrier in response that their phones were stuck in “SOS” mode and that they were unable to make or receive calls.
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“We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue,” a Verizon spokesperson said on Monday afternoon when contacted by RCR Wireless News on Monday afternoon.
At 5:04 p.m., the company posted on X: “Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”
In a post on X on Monday evening at 7:18 p.m. ET, Verizon said that the outage had been resolved, but it did not identify the cause of the disruption.