Verizon confirms service is beginning to come back online after a major outage

New York (CNN) — Verizon has confirmed that its cell service is beginning to come back online following a massive outage affecting some of its mobile phone customers.

“Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored,” a Verizon spokesperson said to CNN Monday. “We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”

The outage appeared to start happening around 11 am ET, with roughly 100,000 reports from customers on DownDetector, a site that tracks complaints about service outages.

Complaints to Verizon’s verified account on X show that customers have been frustrated by a lack of cell service and an inability to connect to the network. Many Verizon iPhone customers complained that their phones had been stuck in “SOS” mode Monday morning, allowing only emergency calls via satellite.

Verizon has 114.2 million subscribers in the United States.

Although relatively infrequent, cell service disruptions have caused some widespread headaches this year. In February AT&T’s network went down for 11 hours, preventing many of its customers across the United States from placing calls, texting or accessing the internet. AT&T said an initial review of the outage found it may have been caused by a technical error introduced by an update to its network. The network went down again for a few hours in June and August.

A telecommunications expert told CNN last month that network outages are typically caused by a combination of three issues: overloaded networks in major cities, software updates that have gone haywire and various technical problems.

But telecom companies are notoriously tight-lipped about the reasons for their outages. So if networks are down, particularly for just a few hours at a time, it’s unlikely the cell service providers will say much about what went wrong.

That can be doubly frustrating for customers, many of whom rely on the networks for a living, including ride-share drivers. They also allow people to access emergency services like 911 on the go. And they have connected the world to friends, family and colleagues no matter where they are.

The Federal Communications Commission said Monday afternoon in a post on X that it was “aware of a Verizon outage impacting customers in parts of the country,” and it was investigating the cause and scope of the disruption.