Verizon reportedly grappled with a widespread outage across the US on Wednesday, leaving thousands of Americans offline and forcing many devices into ‘SOS Mode.’
On October 8, 2025, the outage started at 12:41 a.m. ET and lasted several hours, with services gradually restoring by early morning, marking the company’s second major outage within two months.
According to Downdetector, a web outage tracking site, the wireless service outage started at around 12:41 a.m. ET, and reports spiked over 1,200 in the past 24 hours.
The most affected areas included major cities, including New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, and Phoenix, with widespread reports stretching coast to coast.
The Verizon outage has significantly impacted voice calls, texts, and data. Nearly 51% of reports involved mobile services, while 32% affected 5G home internet.
Experts suggested a potential software, routing failure, or DNS; however, the company didn’t provide any official explanation.
Most services were restored in major cities, as reported by Downdetector, with a few hundred customers nationwide still reporting issues.
Verizon acknowledges the major outage
To soothe the nerves of infrayed users, Verizon has officially addressed the issue and said that its engineers were working to restore service; however, the cause remains under wraps.
The company has further instructed users to restart devices or use Wi-Fi calling as needed.
