With Verizon having all hands on deck in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the Telecom giant experienced a sudden nationwide outage this morning, leaving millions of customers unable to send calls or texts.
The outage began around 9:30 a.m. ET with customers from the Midwest reporting their cell phone service was completely down.
“Well over 100k customers are reporting issues with mobile phones,” Tea Storm Chasers, a nonprofit that tracks storms and police scanner calls, said on X.
A map charting the outages showed it spread from New York City to as far west as Colorado, and as far north as Minnesota, but centering mostly in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and parts of Kentucky.
According to DownDetector, a website that monitors internet service disruptions, outage reports came flooding in, with more than 105,000 reported in a single 15-minute time slot around 11 a.m.
Half of those who notified the site cited mobile phone internet outages, with 14 percent reporting a total blackout.
Shortly before noon, Verizon released a brief statement on X.
“We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers,” it said. “Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
The company did not say how many people were affected by today’s outage, what caused the widespread malfunction, or whether it is related to the damage caused by Hurricane Helene, one of the strongest storms to hit the East Coast in recent history.
In addition to the enormous damage, massive flooding has created dangerous conditions in parts of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, impeding Verizon technicians from doing the necessary repairs and setting up generators.
“We continue to experience service impacts in parts of the Southeast due to prolonged power outages, massive flooding, access restrictions, and extensive fiber damage,” the company said in a press release on Sunday evening.
So far, the company has deployed more than 20 mobile satellite assets to provide temporary connection to cellular towers to get them back online, as technicians work hard to restore permanent fiber connections. Twenty-one more satellite assets are expected to be installed in the following days, Verizon said, as it works with local power and telecom providers, first responders, and local and state officials.
The company on Thursday promised to waive all postpaid domestic calls, texts, and data usage between Sept. 26 and Oct. 5. for all of its Florida and Georgia customers and its prepaid customers in select counties in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
“This will bring relief to the thousands of customers who rely on their mobile devices now more than ever, especially during this challenging time,” the company said.
At the time of writing, Verizon had not provided a time for when users could expect their cell service to return to normal regarding today’s sudden outage.