Verizon blackout leaves users without data in New York, Chicago, and other major US cities

Many Verizon customers in the US have complained about outages on the network, with the majority of users facing an "SOS" or "Emergency Calls Only" message.

​As per outage tracking website Downdetector, the network outage was widespread, with reports of service problems coming in from many major metropolitan areas, including New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

​The website also reports that complaints of the outage peaked around midnight Eastern Time (ET) and then kept reducing. 53% of the complaints were related to ‘Mobile Phone’ issues, 32% around ‘5G Home Internet’, and 16% about ‘No Signal’.

​“Phone keeps ending calls and when I try to call back, it says it couldn't connect,” complained one user on Downdetector.

​“Mine goes from LTE to 5G to 5G UW to shutting itself off and I have dead zones in my house. Does anyone else have this problem?” added another user.

​“There was also a MASSIVE Verizon outage. Don't know and I do not have a need to know what your internet provider is but it could be that 2. To me it was something with upload speed or something that hampered it,” noted another user on X.

​“Goodnight guys. It’s taken me like 20 minutes to post this because it seems Verizon’s 5G is down. Hopefully catch you tomorrow,” noted another user.

​Media reports say that Verizon is “aware of issues impacting service” and its engineering teams are troubleshooting the problem. Verizon has not confirmed the root cause of the outage but stated that it was related to a ‘software issue’. Reports suggest that the issue could be related to software or configuration errors within Verizon's core network infrastructure.

​What to do if you are still facing issues with Verizon?

​The outage seems to be largely under control now, but if you are still seeing the after-effects of the blackout, there are a few things you can do.

​Turn on Airplane mode for a few seconds and then turn it back on.

​Restart your device and see if that ends up bringing your connectivity back.

Use a Wi-Fi to make calls over the internet if you still can't get service from Verizon