Verizon, a leading telecommunications provider, faced a significant service disruption that lasted for over three hours on Wednesday morning, Your Content has learned.
This interruption left thousands of Americans unable to access their mobile and internet services, and even reach local law enforcement agencies.
The service disruption began around 6am ET, as reported by customers, and was resolved by 9:30am ET, according to a statement provided by Lincoln Police. The root cause of this widespread disruption remains unclear.
DownDetector, an online service outage tracker, indicated that the majority of the reported issues were related to mobile phones (57%), followed by mobile internet (25%), and lack of signal availability (19%). A real-time issue map highlighted that the disruption was particularly severe along the eastern seaboard, affecting major urban centers such as New York City, Washington DC, and Boston, Massachusetts.
Despite DownDetector indicating the start of the problems around 8am, some users reported losing internet service as early as 6am. One Verizon customer from Philadelphia voiced their frustration on X (previously known as Twitter) at 8:20am, questioning the status of their WiFi service which had been down for nearly two hours, and the long wait times to speak with a representative.
The service disruption also affected local law enforcement agencies. A police station in Bartlett, Tennessee, informed residents that the outage was affecting their ability to receive calls, although 911 emergency calls were still operational.
The Cleveland Police made a similar announcement regarding their non-emergency number. Other police departments across the country shared similar updates on X.