A widespread Verizon Wireless outage is affecting thousands of customers up and down the East Coast on Tuesday morning. The first reports appeared on social media early Tuesday morning, and Verizon’s official support account on Twitter confirmed the outage at around 8 a.m. ET. According to the account, Verizon’s technicians are aware that “a ton of customers” are being affected, and are working to get the matter resolved quickly.
Interestingly, the outage appears to be causing problems with texting, as customers affected are unable to send or receive text messages. Verizon has suggested that customers “periodically restart your devices as this issue can be resolved at any time,” so restart your phone at least once if you can’t text.
Looking at Down Detector, the number of reports of problems with Verizon’s service suddenly shot up at around 6:00 a.m., peaking with over 4,000 reports just before 9:00 a.m. Some customers on the site have since reported that their service has been restored, but at the time of writing, plenty of people were still tweeting at Verizon’s customer service account complaining about the outage. Verizon wasn’t able to provide a timetable for a fix.
At this time we do not have a time frame available. We have a ton of customers that are being effected by this, and we're working non-stop to get this matter resolved promptly. We recommend to periodically restart your devices as this issue can be resolved at any time. *IXR
— Verizon Wireless CS (@VZWSupport) March 12, 2019
If and when Verizon issues an official update regarding the outage, we’ll be sure to update this post. In the meantime, be sure to restart your phone every once in a while to see if the issue has been resolved. And don’t bother tweeting at the @VZWSupport account — the canned Twitter responses won’t do anything to help you send texts again.
UPDATE: Verizon emailed out the following statement at 10:28 a.m. on Tuesday morning: “We experienced an issue impacting texting services for some customers this morning. Our engineers were able to identify and resolve the issue quickly. Service is now fully restored.”
