Joseph Maldonado/CNET
Verizon said late Wednesday that it has resolved a major service outage on Wednesday that reportedly affected more than 2 million customers, rendering them unable to use their devices.
In a comment to CNET sent late Wednesday, a Verizon spokesperson said that the problem appears to be fixed and the company will contact customers who were affected. "The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network," read the statement. "For those affected, we will provide account credits. Details will be shared directly with customers. We sincerely apologize for the disruption."
The spokesperson did not offer a cause for the disruption.
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The outage caused phones to become stuck in SOS mode. Although the outage seemed to slowly begin to resolve, with some users getting service back on their phones, others said on Downdetector that their phone began briefly working again, but then went back into SOS mode. User reports on Downdetector peaked at just over 180,000.
"I heard that people are getting service back but can't make any calls or do anything, that happened to me to here in Tampa, came back for 3 minutes then immediately went back into SOS," one commenter wrote. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as CNET.)
Approximately 7 hours into the outage, a Verizon spokesperson sent email to CNET apologizing for the outage and promising that the company would give credits to customers who were affected. "Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry. They expect more from us," the statement read. "We are working non-stop and making progress. Our teams will continue to work through the night until service is restored for all impacted customers. We will make this right - for any customer affected, we will provide account credits and share updates soon."
In an earlier comment to CNET, Verizon confirmed the interruption, stating, "Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible."
Other carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile were been quick to poke fun at their competitor while touting their own services. They've taken to X to note that if their customers' calls aren't going through, it's not an issue on their end, but on Verizon's.
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