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Verizon Communications United States IT

Verizon Cellphone Users Report Outages Across the US 60

Posted by msmash from the can-you-hear-me dept.
Thousands of Verizon users across the United States reported having little or no cellphone service on Monday morning in major cities, including in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New York and Phoenix. From a report: According to the website Downdetector, which tracks user reports of internet disruptions, more than 104,000 cases of Verizon outages were reported across the country as of 11:20 a.m. Eastern, more than an hour after the first issues were reported.

A map posted on the site showed cities with the most reports. On the site, many users said their cellphones were intermittently displaying SOS mode and that they could not place calls or send or receive text messages. "We're aware of the issue affecting service for some customers," a spokesman for Verizon, Ilya Hemlin, said in a telephone interview at 11:30 a.m. "Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to solve the issue," he added.
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Verizon Cellphone Users Report Outages Across the US More

Verizon Cellphone Users Report Outages Across the US

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  • Is this happening more regularly? Or am I just paying more attention to it because I'm irrationally paranoid of cyberattacks leading up to the election?

    • Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)

      by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @11:17AM (#64828585)
      Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

    • Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)

      by crunchy_one ( 1047426 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @11:23AM (#64828597)
      Looking at the heat map at DownDetector, my first guess would be that fiber links were severed by Helene and that Verizon is causing routing failures by trying and failing to work around the severed links.

      • It will be interesting to see if you are correct.

        This would not happen if the providers operated the way they did some 20 years ago. Your phone would try to connect to your carrier first, but would fail back to other carriers, so that as long as there was compatible signals, you could connect. Of course, you might end up paying for roaming, but at least you were connected. Carriers didn't like paying exchange fees, and always thought someone else was profiting off them, so they worked to shut this down.

      • That can't be all of the reason, or even most of it. I live in Trinidad, CO and my Verizon service went down this morning. I had to go to Pueblo, CO, for a medical appointment and there was no connectivity anywhere along the way, or in Pueblo, causing me to miss my appointment because my GPS couldn't work. If this was all caused by Helene, it's hard to see how it would be affecting service in Colorado.
      • I was wondering if something like this would happen. In the early 2000's one of the US's largest internet exchange points was in Charlotte. That's pretty close to some of the hard-hit areas. Apparently the network is more decentralized than it was 20 years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's still a vulnerability there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Is this happening more regularly? Or am I just paying more attention to it because I'm irrationally paranoid of cyberattacks leading up to the election?

      “Once is happenstance. Twice is incompetence.
      Three times is failure to test disaster recovery scenarios."

    • yeah, my thoughts seem to coincide...

    • But aren't Verizon customers just a bunch of cranky people who overpay for a service just so they have the ability to complain about it loudly?

      • Not in my case. I have prepay. It's $35/mo and includes enough Internet that I never run out, though I only really use it while driving or when I'm eating lunch out since I have Wi-Fi access at home and work. I hear from Verizon customers with bills starting at twice what I'm paying and just shake my head.

        On the other hand, signal and uptime are both poor. When we had our quake here a little while back the cell went down, Verizon claimed they were bringing us a generator, and then they just didn't bother to

        • On the other hand, signal and uptime are both poor. When we had our quake here a little while back the cell went down, Verizon claimed they were bringing us a generator, and then they just didn't bother to. We were down for almost three days.

          And there was much rejoicing here on /. as the signal to noise ratio improved.

    • So, Iran is meddling, true. Verizon customers are experiencing outages, true.

      What do you suppose would connect these two things? What benefit would Iran get from causing cell services outages? Would that somehow benefit one candidate or the other? I don't get your thought process.

      • Both Russia and Iran are pissed at us for different reasons. Iran's (allegedly) out to get Trump and Russia blames us for Ukraine giving them a bloody nose in their territory. I agree Iran's involvement in this specific case doesn't seem to have reason, but Russia would very much like to disrupt communications here even if just to say "see we can mess with you, too." Strong compelling case? Nah. But I do wonder.

        This is less about me believing that this particular incident was intentional and more a

        • What reason would our government have to keep such meddling a secret? They have already repeatedly informed us that Iran is trying to meddle in US elections. https://apnews.com/article/ira... [apnews.com] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/09... [npr.org] https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]

          Unlike in Russia or Iran, our government doesn't "look weak" because foreign powers are meddling. Our strength is demonstrated by our ability to detect and report such hacks. Bringing them out into the open is more powerful than keeping them a secret.

          • What reason would our government have to keep such meddling a secret?

            Mobile service going down is scarier to the general public when it's done by an adversary overseas than when a technician plugs something in backwards.

            Bringing them out into the open is more powerful than keeping them a secret.

            The reason they told us about Iran's plans was so half the country wouldn't assume Biden ordered it.

            • You greatly exaggerate how afraid people are of a foreign power causing mayhem. Now, if the outage lasted for days, that would get their attention. But a day-long outage is an annoyance, not a fear-inducing event.

              The half of the country that might believe Biden ordered the outage, would believe that regardless of any heads-up provided by the FBI. I know such people, but thankfully, they are not in the majority, even among Republicans. Many Republicans are just as disgusted with all the conspiracy theories,

              • You greatly exaggerate how afraid people are of a foreign power causing mayhem.

                I need to nitpick this a little: I'm not talking about people at all, I'm talking about how the government sees it. That said, I think you give the general public more credit than they deserve. Remember trying to find toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic? Or bomb threats in Springfield, OH?

                The half of the country that might believe Biden ordered the outage,

                Biden ordering the outage...? I was talking about why the gov't told us about Iran's intentions to take out Trump.

                • Your view of "how the government sees it" seems rooted in conspiracy theories. The government keeps lots of secrets, to be sure. But they don't do it well. Leaks are everywhere. If the government was trying to hide something, it wouldn't stay hidden long.

                  As for the public, the "wisdom of the crowd" is more rational than you give them credit for. The toilet paper run was a predictable overreaction. Most people didn't run out and stock up on toilet paper because they were afraid of supplies actually running o

                  • Your view of "how the government sees it" seems rooted in conspiracy theories.

                    No, it's rooted in how the Trump Administration tried to deny the existence of COVID. I can't say for certain any other administration would behave that differently.

                    The toilet paper run was a predictable overreaction.

                    It clearly wasn't that predictable.

                    Do you think these people believe the government report for a half a second? I doubt it.

                    Since there wasn't a demonstration about it: Yes.

              • I apologize, I wrote something unclear originally and wanna try to do a little better here... That's what I get for tying in a hurry. Sigh.

                I need to nitpick this a little: I'm not talking about people at all, I'm talking about how the government sees it.

                What was I was trying to say was I'm not talking about how I think people would react. I'm talking about how the government thinks people will react. Separately I was trying to point out that you and I have seen reasons to question how well rationality would reign in an emergency. I probably shouldn't have tried to put the two thoughts in the same paragraph.

                I think

                • Hey, I appreciate that we're having a conversation, with no name-calling, even if we don't fully agree! Thanks for that.

  • I guess people can't hear him now (Score:5, Funny)

    by Targon ( 17348 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @11:21AM (#64828593)

    "Can you hear me now?"....nope.

  • Verizon new fee coming... (Score:3)

    by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @11:30AM (#64828605)
    Verizon customers will see a new fee on their bill as a result of this outage -- current, future, and preventive outage fee. /s
    • a few months back i saw a new fee for 5G. I called them up to complain, because, well, my old phone doesn't have the capability to send/receive 5G, it is old enough that it hasn't those radios in it.

      TLDR; they said shut up and suck it, we now charge everyone for that.

    • Switch to prepaid wireless. Those stupid fees aren't applied to prepaid customers, and the plans and coverage are just as good, if you don't need them to subsidize your phone.

      • Hows the speed performance nowadays? The de-prioritization for prepaid phones was pretty bad the last time I tried MVNO pre-paid.

        • I have on numerous occasions needed to turn my prepaid phone into a wifi hotspot when I don't have a fixed connection readily available. The hotspot is easily able to handle Zoom or Teams meetings with video, and pretty much anything else you need to do with wireless internet. If they're deprioritizing prepaid data, I'm not able to detect it, it works great, as far as I can tell.

          • Thanks! And wow, a real and helpful response on Slashdot.It's been a while since I've seen that! Im debating switching from T-Mobile to a T-Mobile MVNO thats much cheaper but was scared about the whole deprioritization stuff.

            • Oh you're welcome!

              I've also used T-Mobile's prepaid service and hotspot, with similar good results. But as with all cell service, your mileage may vary depending on how good your connection is to the nearest cell tower.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      A company that rhymes with Ate Tea and Pee used to invent & insert screwy fees like "wiring insurance", and were slow to remove them upon complaining. Wells Fargo ain't the only ghost-fee sinner, just merely got caught so far.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Targon ( 17348 )

        Note that Verizon bought many of those local phone companies after Bell was broken up, and Verizon then not only kept on putting in hidden fees, but was caught adding services with a free first month, but then charging money every month for services that people didn't even know they now had. That's Verizon, the old phone company. AT&T has largely moved beyond that "local phone company" stage, but AT&T doesn't offer even Internet service in most areas at this point, so only their cellular service

  • ...I saw them! They ate my pets and [bleeped] my refrigerator.

  • I guess the problem is here in Campbell/San Jose, too.

  • I hope the subscribers get them without having to contact VZW.

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