{"id":123418,"date":"2026-01-14T22:38:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T22:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/123418\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T22:38:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T22:38:16","slug":"verizon-users-face-outages-nationwide-including-in-houston-houston-public-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/123418\/","title":{"rendered":"Verizon users face outages nationwide, including in Houston \u2013 Houston Public Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t\t<img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-478315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/dims.apnews-1.webp.webp\" alt=\"A man uses a cell phone\" width=\"980\" height=\"653\"  \/><\/p>\n<p>AP Photo\/Jenny Kane, File<\/p>\n<p>FILE \u2013 A man uses a cell phone in New Orleans on Aug. 11, 2019.<\/p>\n<p>Verizon users nationwide are facing a service outage on the telecommunications company&#8217;s cellular network.<\/p>\n<p>Though the extent of Wednesday\u2019s outage was not immediately clear, Verizon confirmed its engineers were aware and &#8220;working to identify and solve the issue quickly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Users in Houston were affected by the outage. Users reported seeing &#8220;SOS&#8221; at the top of their phones rather than a cellular network signal.<\/p>\n<p>Sign up for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.houstonpublicmedia.org\/hellohouston\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today\u2019s service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Verizon News (@VerizonNews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/VerizonNews\/status\/2011517297572380929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">January 14, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue,&#8221; Verizon said in a Wednesday afternoon post on X. &#8220;We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Outage tracker Downdetector showed that Verizon customers began to report issues with their service around 11 a.m. Reports appeared to peak at more than 175,000 by 11:30 a.m. \u2014 but still remained elevated later in the afternoon, sitting at nearly 68,000 as of 1:30 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>In cities like New York, warnings were sent out noting that the outage may disrupt 911 calls \u2014 urging residents try landlines or a device from another carrier, if available, in case of an emergency, or visit local police or fire stations in person.<\/p>\n<p>When cellular outages happen, some phone companies also urge consumers to try to connect to Wi-Fi and <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/att-outage-cell-service-phone-1cd6f595356b385cc9a4495d1f06b983\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">use internet calling<\/a>. If Wi-Fi is still unavailable, there can be a limited number of other options \u2014 including sending messages via satellite on newer iPhones.<\/p>\n<p>The Associated Press contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AP Photo\/Jenny Kane, File FILE \u2013 A man uses a cell phone in New Orleans on Aug. 11,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[53497,53498,56,58,57,66,4491,223,10284,53499,3621,53500,32124],"class_list":{"0":"post-123418","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-cellular-network","9":"tag-cellular-reception","10":"tag-houston","11":"tag-houston-headlines","12":"tag-houston-news","13":"tag-local","14":"tag-national","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-outage","17":"tag-service-outage","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-telecommunications","20":"tag-verizon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}