Verizon outage affects tens of thousands of users, tracking site shows

Business

The site’s outage map showed that the most disruptions were in major metropolitan areas such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington and Portland, Oregon.

By Adeel Hassan, New York Times Service

January 14, 2026 | 3:04 PM

1 minute to read

Verizon said on Wednesday that it was working to restore its mobile and data services, as more than 170,000 users reported outages to the website Downdetector, which tracks user reports of service disruptions.

That number had dropped to about 100,000 by 2 p.m. Eastern.

Some users said their mobile devices displayed “SOS” in the status bar where their network signal normally appeared.

Downdetector showed that the outage began just after noon on Wednesday.

The site’s outage map showed that the most disruptions were in major metropolitan areas such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington and Portland, Oregon. It was not clear what caused the interruption in service.

“We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers,” said a spokesperson for Verizon, Karen Schulz. “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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.