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 apologized for the outage and promised 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.
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.”
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The outage caused phones to become stuck in SOS mode. Although the outage is slowly beginning to resolve, with some users getting service back on their phones, others are claiming 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.)
A statement on Verizon’s website currently says, “Verizon is aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers. We are working to restore service quickly.”
Other carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile have 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.
Outages like this one, while rare, can make seemingly outdated tech like landlines appealing, even in the age of smartphones.
