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Widespread Verizon Outage Prompts Emergency Alerts in Washington, New York City (nbcnews.com) 16

Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services. From a report: The nation's largest wireless carrier said that its "engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly." Verizon's statement came after a swath of social media comments directed at Verizon, with users saying that their mobile devices were showing no bars of service or "SOS," indicating a lack of connection.

Verizon, which has more than 146 million customers, appears to have started experiencing services issues around 12:00 p.m. ET, according to comments on social media site X. Users also reported problems with Verizon competitor T-Mobile. But the company said that it was not having any service issues. "T-Mobile's network is keeping our customers connected, and we've confirmed that our network is operating optimally," a spokesperson told NBC News. "However, due to Verizon's reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time."

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Widespread Verizon Outage Prompts Emergency Alerts in Washington, New York City

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  • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @03:43PM (#65924488) Homepage Journal

    When we had our last set of quakes here in Humboldt we lost VZ coverage in my town because the cell tower had inadequate backup power. Verizon promised to bring a generator out and then... didn't. Had no phone service for three days.

    I'd get something else but it's all shit here. ATT? Fuck that. US Cellular? I know from experience trying to call people that they will regularly just tell callers to go fuck themselves instead of allowing them to leave you a voicemail. T-Mobile has 0 towers here.

    • Yeah, VZW has been sucking ass for a while now. My main carrier is Tmo, which has a pretty solid buildout in my home areas, but I have VZW as backup for when I travel.

      Lately, one of the main areas in which I use VZW has been seeing dialup-modem-level performance, and as an added bonus, MMS quit working entirely on their network. They tell me to check the APNs, which doesn't work because Verizon demanded that Google lock users out of APN settings. I got it to work for a while by manually editing settings

  • WA State or DC? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by plstubblefield ( 999355 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @03:48PM (#65924502)

    PSA: When composing titles, please use either "Washington State" or "Washington DC" (or "D.C."). Otherwise, those of us in the affected locations have to read through the article to determine whether the information applies to us. (In this case, it was the original NBC News post that first committed this faux pas, neglecting to disambiguate between the locations until the tenth paragraph!)

  • Dont worry (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mukundajohnson ( 10427278 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @04:02PM (#65924538)

    They'll apologize and give you 5 dollars for your trouble

  • Interesting my phone is out but not my wife's. Mine has 5Guw but her's doesn't.
  • And then I remembered we switched away from Verizon late last year. It just took a couple seconds to realize it. I had gotten so used to dealing with the Verizon network being down. One time it was down so long that I bought a mint mobile SIM to get connected.

  • by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @02:11AM (#65925554)

    We were out for over 9 hours here in Fairfax (VA suburb of Washington, DC). I live on the border of Fairfax and Alexandria (also near Arlington).

    Service stopped around noon (maybe a little before, or after; I didn't notice right away and then thought it was just me. It came back at 9:34 PM.

    During the outage I was able to text message at least some Verizon customers. But when it came back, I got a flood of texts from other people who I think are on other carriers. During the outage my FIOS internet worked fine (no land line though).

    For some reason, my iPhone was unable to make calls over Wifi. I had that enabled, but dialing a number did the same thing as a carrier call: an instant "Call Failed". No matter what I was trying to call.

    People on the Internet around here said that there was also no way to call 911 from any phone on Verizon Wireless.

    This was a massive disaster affecting public safety, as well as the government and military. Verizon is the biggest carrier here in the D..C. area.

Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users?

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