Verizon late Monday afternoon reported progress on resolving a “network issue” that spurred widespread outages across parts of the U.S., including in the Chicago area.
In a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, at 4:04 p.m., the wireless network provider said its engineers were “making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored.”
“We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today,” the company’s statement continued. “We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”
The issue appeared to knock out cellphone service for tens of thousands of Verizon users. Data from outage tracker DownDetector shows that reports topped 100,000 shortly after 10 a.m. CT — and while that number dropped significantly, nearly 48,000 were still facing issues closer to 3 p.m. CT. In the Chicago area, more than 4,000 customers reported to be without service at the height of the outage – at roughly 10:30 a.m. By 2:30 p.m., the number of reports had dropped to around 1,200.
An outage map from Downdetector showed the “most reported” outage locations to be Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Omaha, Cincinnati, Denver, Seattle and Columbus.
The Federal Communications Commission, the nationwide agency that regulates interstate and international communications, acknowledged the outages, saying, in part, “…We are working to determine the cause and extent of these service disruptions.”
Some Verizon iPhone customers saw SOS messages displayed in the status bar on their cellphones. The message indicates that the device is having trouble connecting to their cellular provider’s network, but it can make emergency calls through other carrier networks.
During cell service outages, one alternative is connecting to nearby Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi calling is also a built-in feature on most Android devices and iPhones and can be turned on under the phone’s settings.