What you need to know
- Verizon has suffered a sudden nationwide outage, leaving hundreds of thousands of users with SOS-only service instead of signal bars.
- The disruption began late morning on Jan. 14 and quickly escalated, with more than 170,000 outage reports logged on DownDetector by early afternoon.
- Major U.S. cities were hit hardest, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C., where calls, texts, and mobile data all failed.
Update
(Update: 6:03 PM ET): This afternoon, Verizon provided an update on the current outage affecting hundreds of thousands of its users.
According to its post on X, the company’s teams are “on the ground actively working to fix today’s service issue that is impacting some customers.” Right now, it appears as though the outage is still affecting a significant portion of Verizon’s customers. TechRadar offered an update, as well, stating some have seen their service returned, while others are barely scraping by with LTE.
This issue will likely extend into the evening, so make sure you have an alternative method of communication if possible.
The original article can be read below.
Verizon has lost service for hundreds of thousands of users, and phones across the U.S. showed SOS instead of signal bars.
On Wednesday, Verizon’s network went down without warning, leaving customers across the country with SOS-only status bars and dropped calls, TechRadar reports. Problems started late morning on Jan. 14, and by early afternoon, DownDetector had recorded over 170,000 outage reports from all over the U.S.
At the height of the outage, users in major areas like New York, Nevada, Florida, Las Vegas, and Texas could not make calls, send texts, or use mobile data on Verizon’s network. Even Verizon’s network status page reportedly had trouble loading.
On social platforms like X and Reddit, frustrated subscribers shared stories of dropped calls, unreachable contacts, and phones stuck in SOS mode for several minutes.
Verizon posted a statement on its official X account, saying it is “aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers” and that engineers are working to find and fix the problem.
We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers. 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.January 14, 2026
The company apologized for the inconvenience but has not said what caused the outage or when service will be fully restored.
Mobile virtual network operators that use Verizon’s network, like Visible, seemed to avoid the worst of the outage and continued to work normally even while Verizon’s main network was down.
