William Gallagher
Carrier Verizon claims to have restored service across the country, but iPhone and Android users are still waiting to be told what happened — and how it can be prevented from happening again.
Verizon's service was disrupted for approximately eight hours on September 30, 2024, with some hundreds of thousands of users affected. It's not know exactly how many people were unable to use the service, nor precisely how widespread it was — because Verizon is not answering questions.
Verizon engineers have fully restored today's network disruption that impacted some customers. 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.
— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) September 30, 2024
Verizon's tweet concerning the restoration of service downplays the extent of the outage, and the company also failed to acknowledge the problem for many hours. At one point, over 100,000 users had reported issues to Downdetector.com, before Verizon commented publicly.
Following the claim that normal service had been resumed, social media included multiple reports of people saying it was still not working for them. Regarding the advice to restart devices, one user tweeted, "Still trying to get an elderly relative back online and no amount of restarting or toggling airplane mode is fixing it."
Without any information from Verizon, users presumed that the issue was with the service in general, and cell towers in particular. However, some noted that on their Verizon family plans, only the account holder's phone appeared to have an outage.
This can't be confirmed without details from Verizon. It's not possible to adequately gauge how many users had this issue of some phones working while others did not.
If this user-specific issue turns out to be correct, and not just a coincidence, then it suggests that Verizon's user database systems may be at fault. Verizon's backend systems have recently been criticized for how they inadvertently block many Apple Watch owners from activating their cellular plans.
AppleInsider has reached out to Verizon for any comment.
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Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Andrew O'Hara
4 Comments
I'm no expert, but the fact that the affected phones looked like they weren't even activated on Verizon, I'm guessing that something happened to the database of activated IMEI numbers was corrupted somehow. The one Verizon phone I have (not my daily driver phone) showed as if there was no service. Even after a reboot, the signal meter never showed a signal, not even for an instant. It was always greyed out with an "x" symbol. Yet, from other reports, somebody else standing right next to a person without service, works fine. My Verizon 5G Home Internet box also worked, so I just think that it wasn't the towers, but whatever "allows" a device on the network was not working.
I didn’t even notice that Verizon was down for that long. About one week prior Spectrum went down for about 10 hours. They didn’t explain anything either. Neither of these services had ever been unavailable for so long in the past 5 years for me. My neighbor wasn’t happy when I showed her how to use her phone as a hot spot to connect to her office during the Spectrum outage.
Must be DEI.
/s