Updated on Jan. 14 at 4:46 pm ET: Verizon released a new statement Wednesday afternoon, saying its team was on the ground working on the decision.
“The Verizon team is working diligently to resolve today’s service issue affecting some customers,” the company wrote in X. “We know this is a major inconvenience, and our priority is to get you back online and connected as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”
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Updated on Jan. 14 at 4:02 pm ET: As the Verizon outage continues, T-Mobile released a statement on X confirming that its network was still operating normally:
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At this time, only Verizon has confirmed a wireless network outage.
Updated on Jan. 14 at 2:27 pm ET: Verizon has released a new statement regarding its ongoing service disruption. The company stated that the problems were still ongoing, but it was working on a fix.
“Verizon’s engineering teams continue to address today’s service disruptions,” the company wrote in X. “Our teams are still fully operational and focused on the issue. We understand the impact this is having on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.”
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On Wednesday afternoon, thousands of Verizon cell phone customers reported outages, with widespread service outages sending some customers’ phones into SOS mode.
User-reported problems increased on Downdetector during the Eastern days. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
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“Verizon is currently dealing with service disruption across the country that is over 1 million reports (1,053,104) within the last 24 hours,” noted Downdetector in an update Wednesday afternoon. Most Downdetector users reported problems with “complete signal loss” or “mobile phone failure.”
Verizon’s support page on the X wrote that they were aware that users were having problems and were working to fix the problem. A representative for the company provided a similar statement to Mashable.
“We are aware of an issue affecting wireless voice and data services for some customers,” the account posted. “Our engineers are involved and working to quickly identify and resolve the issue. We understand how important reliable communication is and apologize for the inconvenience.”
As the outage continued, users shared their frustrations on social media.
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What does SOS mean on your phone?
In short, if you see SOS on your phone, it means that you are not connected to the mobile network. “If you see SOS or ‘SOS only’ in the status bar, your device is not connected to your mobile network, but you can still make emergency calls through other carrier networks,” reads Apple’s support page for the feature.
In short, although affected customers will not be able to make or receive calls and texts or access data services, they should still be able to make 911 emergency calls via satellite.
Are T-Mobile, AT&T having problems, too?
At about the same time Verizon user-reported problems are rising, so are T-Mobile and AT&T. Both services have experienced an increase in Downdetector reports. That doesn’t mean, however, that carriers were experiencing the same problem confirmed by Verizon. Downdetector tracks problems reported by users, which can be done by mistake or a completely different problem.
What is the cause of the Verizon outage?
So far, Verizon has not released details on the cause of the January 2026 outage. However, this is not the first time Verizon customers have experienced service disruptions.
Verizon mobile customers also experienced brief outages in August and October 2025, which Verizon eventually attributed to software issues. A service outage in 2024 also sent some Verizon customers’ phones into SOS mode.
This story is developing and will be updated as needed…
