There’s no worse way to start a Monday than not having cell service. We’re already battling enough to get through the first morning of the work week. Unfortunately, Verizon customers are navigating this today, with outages across the US.
Verizon Is Experiencing An Outage Across the US
According to Downdetector, reports of service issues started to spike around 10:00 AM Eastern (7:00 AM Pacific) and reached a spike of over 100,000 within the first hour and a half. Of course, even if you didn’t see Downdetector, you might have gotten the same message through social media, to which people have flocked for commiseration.
At the time of writing, Verizon has not given a timeline on when the issue will be resolved. However, there are a few resources you should know about if you’re facing (or worried about facing) a coverage outage today.
Will the Verizon Outage Affect You?
For Verizon customers who might be looking at this news in fear, you can check out a heat map, also courtesy of the Downdetector aggregator. There is no surefire way to predict how wide a service outage will reach, but you might better predict your day by checking to see if you’re in a “hot spot.”
iPhone Users: Check Your Status Bar
If you have Verizon and are an iPhone user, and you’re having trouble making calls or connecting to the internet, take a peek at your status bar. The status bar is located in the upper right corner of your iPhone’s screen, where you see your battery life, WiFi and coverage bars. If, in place of your coverage bars, you see SOS or SOS only, this is a sign that you’re likely affected by the Verizon outage.
The good news is, the iPhone’s SOS feature means that users who see this in their status bars can make emergency calls, even with the general Verizon coverage outage.
If you have iOS 18, you can also use the
Apple Support
app to run diagnostics. This may help you understand if your service issues are a cause of the Verizon outage or based on something else in your location.
A service provider outage tends to remind us of our reliance on our phones. Verizon’s outage comes on top of outages across the Southeastern United States as a result of a hurricane. Together, these events are a wake-up call that on a community and individual level, we need backup systems in place. Perhaps, modern technology like satellite internet could be the answer.
