Verizon Responds to Reports of Outages Across America
Thousands of customers are searching for answers on Wednesday following widespread outages for those using Verizon Wireless. Voice and data services were unavailable for people in multiple states, prompting customers to ask if there was an overall company outages.
Services have been available on an intermittent basis, and the company has issued an official response for those experiencing issues.
"Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly," Verizon said in a statement on Wednesday. "We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience."
Thousands of Verizon Customers Impacted
According to DownDetector, over 200,000 outages have been recorded by Verizon customers over the last 24 hours. Outages have been recorded in several major cities, like New York, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas.
62% of the outages were recorded on mobile phones, while 35% of outages are customers complaining about no cellphone signal. Only 4% of customers reported outages related to mobile internet, suggesting that the issue has more to do with something related to voice calling rather than overall data and connectivity.
Many iPhone users reported seeing "SOS" on their phone, meaning that they were not connected to the Verizon network, but that they could make emergency calls through other carriers. One user on social media said that they did not have service on their iPhone, but that service on their Android phone worked as intended.
T-Mobile and AT&T have experienced similar outages on Wednesday, but on a much smaller scale than the ones experienced at Verizon.
The widespread Verizon outage follows other major tech-related outages over the last several months. A global outage of Amazon Web Services in October rendered several services unusable, from social media apps like Snapchat to commerce hubs like Amazon and Venmo.
Major Tech Outages Have Become a Trend
Microsoft suffered a similar outage to its Azure and 365 services, taking down many of the top sites and apps that customers rely on every single day. Azure is the second most prominent cloud computing platform, trailing only Amazon Web Service in terms of adoption and implementation.
A Cloudflare outage in November affected ChatGPT, Shopify and X, prompting an investigation. After the inquiry, the company concluded that the root cause of the outage was not due to malicious activity or an outside attack.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the company said after the incident took place. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”