WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) – Verizon Communications (VZ.N), opens new tab said late on Wednesday it was making progress in restoring mobile phone service and plans to offer impacted consumers credits for an hours-long outage that disrupted calls, texting and internet usage for hundreds of thousands of customers.
“Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry,” Verizon said. “Our teams will continue to work through the night until service is restored for all impacted customers.”
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The outage prompted several major cities to advise residents to use other carriers to call emergency services.
With the outage more than eight hours old, the carrier said it was still working to resolve the problem but saw no indication of a cyberattack.
The company did not disclose the scope of the disruption. But Downdetector, which aggregates data on service outages, said more than 180,000 reports had been submitted at the peak. Downdetector said it has received 2.2 million reports over the last 24 hours related to the Verizon service disruption.
“Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue,” Verizon said. “We … remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.”
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told Reuters after a congressional hearing the agency will review the issue “and take appropriate action.” Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said she would ask the agency to investigate.
New York City told residents the outage could affect some users trying to call 911 for emergency help. “Call using a device from another carrier, a landline, or go to a police/fire station to report emergencies,” the city said on X. The District of Columbia issued a similar alert.
Some Verizon customers posted frantic messages on social media seeking updates on service restoration.
Verizon faced a nationwide wireless outage in late 2024 that impacted over 100,000 users at its peak. The outage drew the FCC’s attention after several services were affected and iPhone users were stuck in “SOS” mode.
Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed, Bill Berkrot and Cynthia Osterman
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