Extensive Verizon Service Disruption Disrupts Calls and Data Nationwide

Verizon has encountered a major nationwide service disruption, impacting hundreds of thousands of customers who found themselves with SOS-only connectivity instead of normal signal strength. The incident commenced late morning on January 14 and rapidly intensified, with over 170,000 outage reports recorded on DownDetector by early afternoon.

Key U.S. cities, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C., faced the greatest impact, with calls, texts, and mobile data all failing. During the peak of the outage, users in regions including New York, Nevada, Florida, Las Vegas, and Texas were unable to make calls, send texts, or access mobile data on Verizon’s network. Even Verizon’s network status webpage reportedly struggled to load.

On social media platforms like X and Reddit, exasperated customers recounted experiences of dropped calls, unreachable contacts, and devices stuck in SOS mode for extended periods. Verizon released a statement on its official X account, confirming the issue and stating that engineers are actively working to pinpoint and resolve the problem swiftly. The company expressed regret for the disruption but has not revealed the cause of the outage or when services will be completely restored.

Notably, mobile virtual network operators relying on Verizon’s infrastructure, such as Visible, appeared to escape the worst of the outage and continued to operate normally even while Verizon’s primary network was down.