Verizon customers are facing mass outages across the US

Verizon and AT&T wireless customers have found they are unable to make calls, send or receive text messages, or download mobile data. At the time of publishing this article, the issue does not appear to have been resolved.

Throughout the morning, users complained on social media that their phones were displaying “SOS” mode, which allows for emergency calls but nothing else. Mobile phones sometimes offer this if the user does not have a SIM card registered on the device. Resetting the device and other common solutions do not solve the problem. For most of the morning, Verizon did not respond to the reports.

Within a few hours, more than 100,000 users reported problems on the Downdetector website. The problem does not appear to be limited to a particular part of the country; Users in California reported issues, as did users on the East Coast and Chicago, among others.

At 10 a.m., some AT&T users also began reporting problems. Outage maps based on user-reported data found that the outages were particularly common in parts of the country otherwise affected by Hurricane Helene.

After a period of silence, Verizon acknowledged the issue in a public statement. “We are aware of an issue affecting service for some customers,” a spokesperson told NBC News and others. “Our engineers are committed and we are working quickly to identify and resolve the issue.”

However, the spokesman did not provide any information about the reasons for the failure. However, it is not the first major outage of an online service this year. AT&T has experienced an outage before, and the CrowdStrike-related outage of Microsoft services caused chaos and made headlines in July.