Verizon Outages Across US As Hurricane Recovery Continues

Final update Verizon customers across the United States are reporting widespread outages on Monday morning, potentially dealing a serious setback to hurricane recovery efforts in America's southeast. 

Reports of widespread outages being experienced by Verizon customers began emerging at around 9am EDT, with notes of both voice and data being unavailable for some customers, but not all.

While many of the outages were reported in regions dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, they haven't been confined to those areas, with Down Detector's heat map indicating outages in California, Arizona, and other western states as well. 

At least 115 people have been killed, many remain missing, hundreds of roads are closed due to damage, streets of property washed away in floods, and communications to those affected proving difficult.

"We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers," a Verizon spokesperson told The Register. "Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue."

Verizon has reported widespread damage to its network in Helene's wake, but it has noted an additional problem that might be behind the outage: Cables being cut during recovery efforts.

"Fiber is the invisible footprint that moves data throughout Verizon's network across the country and around the world," Verizon said on its hurricane recovery page. 

"Cutting those cables when digging can result in customers losing service and data connections being lost," the Tier 1 carrier added, urging anyone doing storm cleanup to call local officials before digging and potentially causing further network damage. 

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Outages at T-Mobile US and AT&T were reported today as well, and in many of the same geographic regions as the Verizon outages. We reached out to both telcos to learn more.

AT&T told The Register its network was functioning normally, and noted it was aware of issues at "another carrier," the same thing T-Mobile US told us in an email.

In other words, AT&T and T-Mobile US subscribers, and even some Verizon users, may be reporting outages purely because they can't reach Verizon customers in storm-hit areas but otherwise have working service.

"Based on increased reports on Down Detector related to other providers, we believe our customers may be having challenges connecting with other networks," a T-Mo spokesperson told us. "Outside of some areas where restoration is continuing from Hurricane Helene, our network is operating normally." ®

Updated to add at 2100 UTC

When asked about the status of its repairs, Verizon told us restoration of its service has started, and that work is ongoing.

"We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today," a spokesperson told The Register. "We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue."

Final update at 0015 UTC, September 30

Verizon now tells us things should be back to normal. A spokesperson just pinged us: "Verizon engineers have fully restored today's network disruption that impacted some customers.

"Service has returned to normal levels. If you are still having issues, we recommend restarting your device. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience. We appreciate your patience."