Verizon says its network has been ‘fully restored’ following the hours-long outage

Update, September 30, 7:28PM ET: At 7:18PM ET, the company tweeted that its engineers have resolved the issue. The original story, which was updated twice after publication with statements from Verizon, follows.

Verizon cell phone customers reported widespread outages across the US on Monday. Since about 9:30AM ET, hundreds of thousands of people have reported problems with their cell service to Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted outage reports. The number of reports increased by about 105,000 at 11:20AM, but was still at about 59,000 at 12:52PM.

Many people say they cannot make or receive calls or exchange messages. Those with an iPhone may see “SOS” instead of the usual contact bars at the top right of their screen. That is normal when there is limited or no service. However, affected iPhone users can still make emergency calls through other networks.

The Downdetector heat map suggested the issue was most prevalent in New York, New Jersey, Georgia and elsewhere on the east coast and midwest. A small yellow band of reports was also appearing on the west coast as of 1:10PM ET. and the growing hot spot in Los Angeles.

Verizon has confirmed that service has been affected for some customers. “Our engineers are involved and we are working quickly to resolve this issue,” the company wrote on X at 11:48AM. The reason for its termination was not yet clear.

As of 3:45PM ET, Verizon was supposed to provide an update on the outage with X. End-user reports were still flooding Downdetector, however, about 48,000 of them at 3:10PM.

At 5:04PM ET, the company tweeted that “service has begun to be restored,” and Downdetector reports of outages dropped below 30,000.

At 7:18PM ET, the company tweeted that its engineers “have fully recovered from today’s network outage.” The number of Downdetector outage reports has dropped to less than 3,500. So far there has been no word from the company about what caused the outage.