Verizon reportedly grappled with a widespread outage on Saturday, leaving thousands of Americans offline, including the Bay Area users.
From Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, affected users lost connections to texts, calls, and data for hours; however, the service was restored in the evening.
According to Downdetector, a web outage tracking site, the wireless service outage started at around 2 p.m. PDT Saturday, and reports spiked over 20,000 Verizon outages in the past 24 hours.
For many users, the blackout occurred due to an inconvenience. Phones were stuck in SOS mode, limiting connections to emergency services only and sparking severe alarm among customers.
Verizon addressed the widespread outage
While addressing the major Verizon outage, the company attributed it to a “software issue” via an email.
However, Verizon did not state how many users were affected by the widespread outage.
“Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue,” Verizon stated.
The company further stated that by 6 p.m. PDT, it “started to see service restoration in impacted areas.”
By 7:30 p.m. PDT, most services were restored in the Bay Area and other major cities, according to Downdetector, with a few hundred customers nationwide still reporting issues by midnight.
