Verizon outage affecting thousands of customers

A major service outage affecting Verizon customers that has lasted for hours and prevented some local 911 calls from going through continued Wednesday evening - but there is no evidence of a cyberattack, law enforcement sources said.

Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, said Verizon customers began noticing interrupted service around noon Eastern time.Verizon said it was not immediately clear how long the service would be down.

"We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers," Verizon said in a statement to ABC News. "Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience."

Many Verizon customers said on social media that their phones showed "SOS" in place of network bars. According to Downdetector, at least 178,284 Verizon customers were affected at one point, but that number has since gone down.The highest concentration of reports of Verizon problems, according to Downdetector, was in New York City, Atlanta, Charlotte and Houston. By 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, the number of Verizon customers affected by the outage was down to less than 60,000, according to Downdetector.

The outage is one of several high-profile tech outages in the past year that have interrupted daily life for thousands, including an Amazon Web Services issue that took down most of the web in October. In 2024, a widespread AT&T outage left customers across the United States without service and prompted a Federal Communications Commission investigation.

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