Verizon confirms service is beginning to come back online after a major outage

Jordan Valinsky, CNN

New York (CNN) — Verizon has confirmed that its compartment work is opening to travel backmost online pursuing a monolithic outage affecting immoderate of its mobile telephone customers.

“Verizon engineers are making advancement connected our web rumor and work has started to beryllium restored,” a Verizon spokesperson said to CNN Monday. “We cognize really overmuch group trust connected Verizon and apologize for immoderate inconvenience immoderate of our customers knowledgeable today. We proceed to activity astir nan timepiece to afloat resoluteness this issue.”

The outage appeared to commencement happening astir 11 americium ET, pinch astir 100,000 reports from customers connected DownDetector, a tract that tracks complaints astir work outages.

Complaints to Verizon’s verified relationship connected X show that customers person been disappointment by a deficiency of compartment work and an inability to link to nan network. Many Verizon iPhone customers complained that their phones had been stuck successful “SOS” mode Monday morning, allowing only emergency calls via satellite.

Verizon has 114.2 cardinal subscribers successful nan United States.

Although comparatively infrequent, compartment work disruptions person caused immoderate wide headaches this year. In February AT&T’s web went down for 11 hours, preventing galore of its customers crossed nan United States from placing calls, texting aliases accessing nan internet. AT&T said an first reappraisal of nan outage recovered it whitethorn person been caused by a method correction introduced by an update to its network. The web went down again for a fewer hours successful June and August.

A telecommunications master told CNN past period that web outages are typically caused by a operation of 3 issues: overloaded networks successful awesome cities, package updates that person gone haywire and various method problems.

But telecom companies are notoriously tight-lipped astir nan reasons for their outages. So if networks are down, peculiarly for conscionable a fewer hours astatine a time, it’s improbable nan compartment work providers will opportunity overmuch astir what went wrong.

That tin beryllium doubly frustrating for customers, galore of whom trust connected nan networks for a living, including ride-share drivers. They besides let group to entree emergency services for illustration 911 connected nan go. And they person connected nan world to friends, family and colleagues nary matter wherever they are.

The Federal Communications Commission said Monday day successful a station connected X that it was “aware of a Verizon outage impacting customers successful parts of nan country,” and it was investigating nan origin and scope of nan disruption.