Mobile carrier Verizon experienced a massive outage on Monday. For several hours, users in the US were unable to make calls or send messages. Downdetector received more than 1.5 million reports of the outage between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm ET. By evening the company was able to restore operations.
According to message Verizon customer service, many customers’ phones were in SOS mode. According to this message, “the outage affected data, voice and text services.” At one point, there were three fifteen-minute periods on Downdetector with over 100,000 user reports of problems.
Po data The Verge, during the incident, communications failures were reported from Paducah, Birmingham, Fairhope, Montgomery, Brookland and 1,678 other cities. Verizon engineers fully restored the outage at 7:18 p.m. ET.
The Federal Communications Commission also issued a statement saying it was aware of the outage and agency experts were “working to determine the cause of these service disruptions.”