Cause Unknown But Many Previous Outages Due to Software Misconfiguration
Verizon customers along the Eastern Seaboard and Southern parts of the United States lost mobile phone connectivity Wednesday in an incident that appears to have peaked around 1 p.m.
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The telecom giant – the largest in the United States, with roughly 146 million subscribers – told customers it was “aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers.”
Approximately 170,000 users took to DownDetector, a website that collects self-reported service outage reports, to convey that their service was affected. Most users complained that their mobile phone lost connectivity – many also taking to social media to say that their phones showed “SOS” in place of network bars.
The outage led to a slew of notices from public safety officials that the 9-1-1 system was still reachable from other carriers and landlines.
Verizon did not offer as of late Wednesday afternoon an explanation for the outage’s cause. The disruption is the latest in a string of network failures at Verizon and other telecom providers. Verizon blamed an August 2025 weekend outage affecting major U.S. cities to a “software-related issue.” Major telecoms have largely shifted from hardware-dominated architecture to software-defined networking and network function virtualization – a network architecture that gives providers more flexibility and centralized control. But it also makes networks prone to misconfiguration errors.
Telecom giant AT&T experienced that problem firsthand during a 12-hour outage in February 2024 in an incident the Federal Communications Commission attributed to a misconfigured network element introduced onto the production network during a nighttime maintenance window. “As a result of the error in configuration, downstream network elements propagated the error further into the network. This triggered an automated response that shut down all network connections to prevent the traffic from propagating further into the network,” the agency concluded.
Nor are U.S. telecoms the only carriers that have succumbed to configuration errors. Canadian telecom Rogers Communications in July 2022 underwent an outage lasting a day in some places in an incident affecting 12 million users. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission said the outage occurred when system administrators removed an access control list from distribution routers. “This consequently resulted in a flood of IP routing information into the core network routers, which triggered the outage,” the agency said.