Verizon has confirmed that yesterday’s nationwide wireless outage was caused by a software issue, though the company has not shared additional details about what went wrong.
“This was a software issue and we are conducting a full review of what happened,” Verizon shared in a statement to BleepingComputer.
The company also said there is no indication that a cybersecurity incident caused the outage.
The outage began around 12 PM ET on January 14, when Verizon customers across the United States started reporting a loss of cellular service.
Many affected users reported that their phones were stuck in SOS mode, preventing them from making calls.
Source: BleepingComputer
SOS mode should normally allow customers to call 911. However, during the outage, New York City Emergency Management warned that some Verizon Wireless customers may be unable to reach 911 and advised residents to use another carrier or landline.
According to customer reports and outage site DownDetector, the disruption was not limited to a specific region or state and impacted users nationwide.
While not all Verizon customers were affected, attempts to call affected numbers returned a message stating that the “called party is temporarily unavailable.”
During the incident, Verizon confirmed the service disruption in posts on X, stating that engineers were working to identify and resolve the issue. At 10:20 PM ET, the company announced that the outage had been resolved and advised customers to restart their devices to reconnect to the network.
Today, Verizon apologized to customers and announced it would provide a $20 account credit to those impacted. The credit will be available in the myVerizon app, and customers will receive a text message when it is available.
“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can,” Verizon said. “But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.”
Verizon has not provided any further information about the software issue, including what systems were involved.
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