Update: Verizon Says Service Restored After Thousands Affected by Outage

Updates a previously posted story about the outage.

Verizon Communications Inc. said service was restored on its wireless network after a widespread outage across the US that lasted for most of the day on Wednesday.

“The outage has been resolved” and the company will provide account credits to affected customers, Verizon said in a statement late Wednesday. “We sincerely apologize for the disruption.”

Verizon, the largest US wireless provider, didn’t give a reason for the disruption. The company earlier said that it had no indication to suggest it could be related to a cyberattack.

Customers began noticing service disruptions shortly before noon in New York, according to Downdetector. Complaints peaked at about 177,339 about an hour later, according to the site. The cities that had the largest number of complaints included New York, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and Miami.

AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. customers were reporting a much smaller number of network issues, according to Downdetector. When one large carrier has issues, a residual effect is that calls to that company’s customers can’t be completed.

The Federal Communications Commission said on X that it was aware of the outages and was monitoring the situation. Separately, FCC member Anna Gomez said she is “paying close attention” to the reports and that she will ask the agency’s consumer and public safety bureaus to “investigate the source of this service disruption.”

Last August, Verizon suffered another significant network outage that affected thousands of customers across the US and disrupted service for several hours. The company said at the time the problem was due to a software issue.

Verizon hasn’t disclosed a reason for the outage on Wednesday. But such disruptions are generally caused by external factors, not carriers themselves, according to David Witkowski, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, an organization that helps to set global technological standards.

Cyberattacks can be one external factor leading to a disruption, he said in an emailed statement, but issues can also be attributed to problems within third-party vendors that “provide contracted compute resources.” Other external factors can include “software updates and patches that work on testbed systems, but fail in deployment due to unforeseen issues with legacy hardware,” he said.

Affected customers who are receiving “SOS” messages on their phones should still be able to place any call via a Wi-Fi connection and to dial 911 directly, according to Jack Burbank, another IEEE senior member. Handsets consume more power in SOS mode as they search for and try to re-establish a signal, so Burbank suggested that impacted users conserve their devices’ energy and plug into a power source if possible.

Verizon named a new chief executive officer last year, tapping former PayPal Holdings Inc. executive Dan Schulman to help turn around several quarters of customer losses. Shortly after he settled in, Verizon cut some 13,000 jobs in an aggressive cost-cutting move.

Investors shrugged off the trouble. Verizon shares closed up 2.1% for the day.