A widespread Verizon outage appears to be affecting tens of thousands of customers on Monday, Sept. 30. User-submitted outage reports on the website DownDetector.com climbed over 73,000 between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. ET, while commentary on social media indicated that many people were losing service as well. So far, Verizon has not made any official announcement about this problem.
DownDetector.com users reported outages throughout the United States on Monday morning, though it’s unclear if the problems are more widespread. User-reported data is incomplete by nature, but it paints enough of a picture to show that these are not likely to be isolated incidents. As always, the outage reports are concentrated in major cities where there are more people overall to gather information from. At the time of this writing, about 57 percent of users reported no mobile phone service, 32 percent reported “no signal” and 11 percent reported “total blackout.” Verizon offers mobile phone service, landlines and home internet, so it’s hard to narrow down the problems this early on.
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Users shared more particulars about their issues on social media, with many different combinations of problems manifesting on different hardware in different places. Many saw their cell service turn off completely, putting their smartphones into “SOS mode,” meaning they could only be used to call emergency services. However, some had home internet outages that didn’t impact their mobile devices, allowing them to troubleshoot their problems on one device but not another.
At the time of this writing, Verizon’s website has no information on this outage, though the “support” and “contact” functions have some general guides to outages. The company’s customer support accounts on X – formerly known as Twitter – have not posted any messages or responded to the kinds of complaints described above. The main Verizon account has not made a post since July, while the customer support account has not made a post since last week in preparation for Hurricane Helene. Naturally, many commenters are wondering if this outage is related to the hurricane and the widespread infrastructure damage it has caused in the southeast. Right now, that is only speculation, as there have been no official reports from the company or from telecommunication officials.
Verizon customers can continue to report issues to the company directly when possible, either through online submissions, phone calls or text messages depending on what is available. The cause of this outage and projected remedy have not been announced at the time of this writing.
