Verizon, the U.S.’s biggest wireless carrier, encountered serious technical issues Wednesday that knocked out service for thousands of customers across the country.
Error reports for Verizon’s wireless service began to spike just after noon ET, with more than 180,000 reports submitted as of 12:39 p.m. on Tuesday, per uptime-monitoring site Downdetector. The problems continued through the afternoon, with error reports for Verizon concentrated on the East Coast in cities including New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., as well as in other parts of the U.S. including Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, L.A. and San Francisco, according to Downdetector.
The cause of the major outage was not immediately known. In a social media post at 4:12 p.m. ET, Verizon’s media-relations team said, “Verizon’s team is on the ground actively working to fix today’s service issue that is impacting some customers. We know this is a huge inconvenience, and our top priority is to get you back online and connected as fast as possible. We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”
Earlier, the telecom provider said in a post at 1:07 p.m. ET that it was “aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers” and its engineers were working “to identify and solve the issue quickly.”
On social media, many Verizon customers said their phones showed “SOS” in place of wireless network bars. The outage prevented some Verizon users from making 911 calls, and officials in New York and Washington advised affected customers to use other wireless providers or landline phones to make emergency calls.
Some AT&T and T-Mobile customers also reported service outages Tuesday — but those may have been related to an inability to reach customers on Verizon’s network. “T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected,” T-Mobile said in a statement at 2:28 p.m. ET. “However due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.”
As of the end of September 2025, Verizon had 146.1 million total wireless retail connections as well as 3.2 million fixed wireless access broadband connections.