Published on: October 2, 2024
Verizon suffered a widespread outage on Monday, impacting hundreds of thousands of customers. More than 200,000 reports of outages came in across the US, including from large cities like Chicago and states like Florida, Georgia, and New York.
Roughly 50% of the reports were related to people’s phones not connecting properly. There were 35% who lost mobile service. Another 14% were experiencing full network blackouts. Some users also reported that the network failure also locked their phones in SOS mode, preventing them from connecting to any Wi-Fi sources.
People began submitting reports en-masse at around 9 a.m. on Monday.
“We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers,” Verizon posted on X. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
The outage went on for several hours before Verizon could begin restoring its systems. As of Wednesday, its service is fully back online and the issue has been fixed.
If you’re still having connection issues, you’ll have to file a new ticket with Verizon, since Monday’s outage has been resolved. If your phone was locked in SOS mode, you should reach out to Verizon.
Many people were concerned that Verizon was facing a massive cyberattack, but there is no current evidence to suggest that’s what happened. Countering that narrative, Verizon explained that the incident was a network issue that they’ve since resolved.
“One, which is the most common, is some kind of human error, where more than likely than not,” explains cybersecurity expert, Brandon Disney. “An update of some sort was pushed out to expand the network upgrade speeds or do something of that nature, and the update went wrong.
“I think their last major outage of this size was back in 2012 so it’s not something that happens real frequently, but it does happen, obviously.”
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently investigating the cause of the outages. Until the investigation is complete, we can only rely on Verizon’s official story.