alt Hacker NewsVerizon outages reported across U.S.
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For those who weren't aware: Verizon got a new CEO late last year and laid off 15% of the workforce (15,000 people). This included people working in network, IT and cyber security.
Since this outage is still going on just a town away from their HQ... porting still works to get you going again on the same towers. You can get the device unlock pin from Verizon postpaid sent through a push message to the device so it doesn't rely on SMS.
Ironically I was planning to port my parents from Verizon to US Mobile to save them some money since they aren't financing any devices (there's a sale from them that ends today) and I've just done that on the first line and I now have service on that line with Verizon, where the remaining Verizon postpaid is still dead.
I got sniped away from Visible (Verizon MVNO) by US Mobile (multi-carrier MVNO) during a Black Friday sale. USM has an interesting thing where you can actually get a separate eSIM for each of the major carriers, and switch between them. I was curious so I signed up for all 3. It's been interesting to see how the signals vary from location to location, and at least a couple times I've been able to get significantly better signal by switching.
The main downside is that you have different numbers for each eSIM, but that doesn't really affect me because I use Google Voice for SMS.
Lol it's network core. Postpaid users on Verizon branded accounts affected. Most MVNO's just fine (checked US Mobile and Visible, different cores... and they are working fine on the Verizon towers)
Recently downloaded bitchat so I can contact my family members if outages like this happen when we’re out and about. I got a few T1000 cards for meshtastic but there’s just too much friction to teach my spouse and others how and when to use it. I wish haloW was built into phones which would make long range local communication much better.
I find this kind of odd. Yesterday, 2026-01-13, I - who lives in the greater Washington D.C. area - experienced A LOT of Verizon disruption. However, today, my service has been excellent. Maybe I'm from the future and don't know it. Did anybody else in my general area experience outages yesterday?
At 2:14PM EST, Verizon said:
"Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible."
As someone responsible my whole career for uptime and network response, I really feel for the engineers, at the same time hoping my service comes back up soon. SOS
It's also weird that some people here in the office on Verizon work fine, and others are on SOS. No correlation between phone versions or hardware that I could deduce. I also see the same on X: https://x.com/CPTholen/status/2011520566159982758
It came up for around 5-10 minutes at 15:00 EST, but is currently still down.
Maybe installing a beam splitter went wrong?
The link just redirects me to https://www.youtube.com/c/FirstCoastNews.
Apparently only affecting east coast numbers.
Some server in NJ is down
This is what happens when you lay off 30% of your workforce.
Some outlets reporting T-Mobile and ATT as well.
I assume state on state cyber attacks are commonplace but get minimized to avoid public fear.. perhaps this will be the first notable one.
It’s Denmark! Ο_o
Anyone still using SMS for 2FA codes, here is your official notice to change that ASAP.
Phone hasn’t had a connection for hours. 5G wireless home is fine. Upstate South Carolina.
i know alot are joking / sarcastic about its a cyber attack- that said, Wouldn't it make more sense that whenever there is a "cyber attack" its more likely it would only affect one provider? ie, each has to have different systems / security postures ect, such that a non-public vuln useful to attack Verizon would likely not be exploitable/exposed at AT&T (or vise versa)?
Verizon acknowledged the issue: https://xcancel.com/VerizonNews/status/2011500483072954495
https://downdetector.com/ shows verizon, tmobile, and att. BUT if you look at the magnitude of the outages for tmobile and att vs verizon it's fractions of a percent. Likely those people with tmobile and att reporting when they have trouble communicating with verizon customers.
(Note, you have to click on the providers to see absolute magnitude -- the graphs are scaled to show relative outage over time within a given provider; order of 150k verizon vs 1.5k others)
Seems like it's happening on the West Coast to
Our Comcast DNS keeps going in and out too, not clear if it is related or knock on effect or something else entirely.
Not sure why this says East coast, I am also affected here in Seattle.
downdetector is showing a lot of down mobile networks & services
This is what happens when you invest more in lobbying than the network
I've got a Verizon Network Extender and it appears to be online - the tunnel is up back to VZW's security gateway, but all of my phones are refusing to register to it.
I did manage to roam onto an international network on the boarder near me in New York/Canada, so some bits of the core seem functional for authentication.
When I roam internationally I appear to be on Telus's 3G network (no LTE) for data and voice is falling even further back it looks like.
I am in Miami right now, and verizon is not working here. (I get the SOS sign).
I have two Verizon phones on very different networks and both have not been working well since Tuesday - anyone also having this? I kept restarting my phones, airplane mode on/off etc
West coast too, down in LA at same time (12 PM EST / 9 AM PST). I think they’re way way way underselling the # affected (“thousands” lol)
good morning sirs
Grok 4.1 down too: https://status.x.ai/api-us-east-1/INC10b35980
The US would never purposefully cut of it's own communications, right? What would be the tells if that would have happened? And what could the average citizen do to be able to communicate regardless? Might be useful to always have that knowledge around, even if it isn't a personal threat to yourself today.
I see multiple posts here speculating on cyberattack—as opposed to "we pushed a bad configuration update which messed everything up irreparably"—you know, like it has been every other time before this.
E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?