Verizon customers throughout the U.S., including Washington state, were without cellular service for about seven hours on Monday, the company announced in two updates on social media.
Service started to be restored about 2 p.m. Monday.
“Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored,” company officials said. “We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”
Early Monday morning began with more than 100,000 reports submitted for Verizon service outages in several states, including Washington.
It was unclear what caused the outage but Verizon announced they were aware of it.
“We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers,” Verizon officials said via social media Monday morning. “Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
According to downdetector.com, more than 104,000 reports were submitted in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Indianapolis and several other major cities about 7 a.m.
About 50% of reports were for mobile phone issues, and another 35% for no service.
CNET, an online media website, reported some Verizon users’ phones were stuck in SOS mode, an emergency setting that allows for contacting and connecting with first responders but not regular friends, family or contacts.
According to CNET, T-Mobile and AT&T confirmed that their respective networks were fine and that issues their respective users may be experiencing could be a result of trying to connect with a Verizon user who doesn’t have working service.
The CNET report said it was unclear if the problems were related to Hurricane Helene, which hit the U.S. over the weekend.
