Massive Verizon Wireless Outage Reported As Users See Only 'SOS'

Verizon Wireless customers from California to New York experienced daylong problems making and receiving phone calls on Monday, as outages were reported nationwide and not fully restored until nearly 5 p.m. PST.

Downdetector.com showed that starting around 6 a.m. PST, customers began noticing the problems. The outages continued throughout much of Monday.

Verizon spokesperson Ilya Hemlin told Patch that the company worked throughout the day to address the outage.

"Starting at 9 AM Eastern time this morning, some Verizon wireless customers may be experiencing connectivity issues," Hemlin said. "Our engineering teams are working diligently on the issue. We will provide additional updates as they become available."

After several hours, Hemlin noted that crews were "making progress" on the network issue. By just before 5 p.m., she said repairs were complete.

"Verizon engineers have fully restored today's network disruption that impacted some customers," she told Patch in an email. "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."

The exact cause of the outage was not disclosed.

A telecommunications expert told CNN that these types of outages are usually caused by a few issues: "overloaded networks in major cities, software updates that have gone haywire and various technical problems."

"But telecom companies are notoriously tight-lipped about the reasons for their outages," CNN said. "So if networks are down, particularly for just a few hours at a time, it’s unlikely the cell service providers will say much about what went wrong."

According to Downdetector.com, the greatest volume of Monday's outages were reported in Chicago, Phoenix, Denver, Indianapolis, Seattle, Omaha, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Los Angeles.

On X, thousands of users took to commenting on Verizon's message about the outage, which it posted nearly three hours after it first began.

"Cool, it's only been several hours and you're just now acknowledging it," one user wrote. " You'll be crediting all of us for however long service was unavailable, right?"

"We are truly sorry to see you in this technical dilemma," Verizon Support responded to another user. "Our goal is to clear things up. Feel free to send us a DM to better assist you. ~Gilbert"

This is just the latest outage to plague users in recent months. In July, a similar outage was reported nationwide and before that, there was one in May.