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The Verizon outage that left more than a million without cell service yesterday is fixed, but what caused it?

Yesterday for upwards of 12 hours Verizon customers trying to use their phone to call, text or even browse the web would be out of luck. The service was down for more than a million customers and an announcement of the outage wasn’t sent out until 10:30 PM Eastern Standard Time.

This Isn’t the first massive Verizon outage we’ve reported on, or the first outage for a cell phone carrier, being without a phone even temporarily in 2026 can feel like being cut off from the world. Verizon has announced that customers can anticipate a credit for the downtime soon, but details are not available as to the amount that will be issued at the time of writing.

The company responded to customers on X with the following after the outage:


“The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network. For those affected, we will provide account credits. Details will be shared directly with customers. We sincerely apologize for the disruption.”

As with prior cellphone service outages customer phones were left stuck in “SOS” mode which indicates you’re not connected to your providers network and the only type of calls you can make are those to emergency services like 911. If this happens to you, it may leave you wondering if it’s you or it’s the service.

Here are three steps you can take to determine if your service is really out or it’s just your phone:

1. Toggle Airplane Mode
• Turn Airplane Mode ON for ~30 seconds, then turn it OFF.
• This forces the phone to re-register with nearby cellular towers.
2. Restart the Phone
• Power the phone fully off (not just a quick reboot), wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on.
• This clears temporary radio/network glitches.
3. Check Cellular & SIM Settings
• Confirm Cellular Data is enabled, and the correct network is selected (Automatic is best).
• If the phone uses a physical SIM, remove it, reseat it, and try again.
• If it’s an eSIM, toggle the line off/on if possible.

While we didn’t report on it at the time, Verizon also suffered a major outage in just August of last year but that outage was smaller in scale and duration. Verizon has 146.1 million customers across the United States. As of writing they have not released the cause of yesterday’s outage but have announced it was not due to a cyber-attack.
Downtime of any kind can be highly disruptive to your business in the following ways:

1. Lost Revenue
When systems are down, sales stop. This can mean missed transactions, abandoned orders, or billable work that simply can’t happen.
2. Reduced Productivity
Employees can’t access tools, data, or systems they rely on, leading to idle time, delays, and expensive workarounds.
3. Damage to Reputation & Trust
Customers notice outages. Repeated or prolonged downtime can erode confidence, trigger complaints, and push clients toward competitors.
As with the Verizon outage, customers were upset and repeated outages are a hit to their overall reputation. Valley Techlogic can protect your business from unnecessary technical outages and downtime, learn more today through a consultation.