- A heatmap on Downdetector shows a cluster of outages around New York, another smaller cluster in Chicago and still smaller clusters in various locations, mostly in the U.S. southeast
- Downdetector said it saw more than 1.6 million user reports of outages
- It’s unknown whether the outage is related to Hurricane Helene, which pounded the U.S. Southeast
Update 10/1/24 12:09 am ET: Verizon reported its engineers had 'fully restored' service Monday evening following a U.S. nationwide outage that lasted most of the day Monday.
"Verizon engineers have fully restored today's network disruption that impacted some customers," according to a company post on X. "Service has returned to normal levels. If you are still having issues, we recommend restarting your device. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience. We appreciate your patience."
Update 9/30/24 5:25 pm ET: Verizon issued a statement Monday evening that its engineers "are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored." The company also apologized to customers for "any inconvenience."
Downdetector saw more than 1.6 million user reports of outages by Monday evening, noting that customers of AT&T and T-Mobile "trying to contact Verizon subscribers may also notice issues," according to a statement from that company.
More than 100,000 Verizon customers were without service Monday, according to reports that began coming in to Downdetector 9 am ET. The reports peaked at 11 am and declined afterward, but remained at roughly 50,000 reports at 1 pm.
Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles and other locations saw the greatest number of reported outages, according to Downdetector. Some customers leaving comments on that site reported no service at all, others said they could only make emergency calls. Some users, like this one, said that they had multiple phones sharing a plan and some were working and some were not.
The Verizon X account was busy responding to customers complaints.
At about noon ET, the Verizon News account posted, “We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
A Verizon spokesperson sent the same message to Fierce in response to a query.
A heatmap on Downdetector showed a big cluster of outages around New York, another smaller cluster in Chicago, and still smaller clusters in various locations, mostly in the U.S. southeast.
It’s unknown whether the outage - or parts of it - is related to Hurricane Helene, which pounded the U.S. Southeast.
We’ll continue to follow this story for updates.
Other outages this year include:
- Millions of AT&T customers lost service due to a network configuration error in February.
- Widespread 911 outages hit four states in April.