Verizon Resolves Hourslong, Widespread Outage

Customers reported service problems particularly in the eastern half of the country; carrier plans to provide account credits

Updated Jan. 14, 2026 10:56 pm ET

Verizon apologized for the outage. Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News

Verizon Communications said Wednesday night that it had resolved an hourslong, widespread outage that prevented customers from making calls and sending messages.

The problem, which started at around noon Eastern time, affected wireless voice and data services for some customers, particularly in the eastern half of the country, a Verizon spokesman said. The company said at around 10 p.m. ET that the outage had been fixed.

“Today, we let many of our customers down, and for that we are truly sorry,” the spokesman said. Verizon said customers still having trouble should restart their devices to reconnect to the network. The company plans to provide account credits to affected customers.

Over one million reports were submitted claiming problems with Verizon service within the past 24 hours, according to Downdetector, an outage-tracking site. The crisis reached a peak of more than 178,000 concurrent reports early Wednesday afternoon, according to a Downdetector spokeswoman. That is many more reports than in a typical day.

Not all Verizon customers were affected, and reports of the outages were scattered nationally, with many concentrated in the metro areas of New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and Miami, according to the site.

Verizon named a new chief executive this past fall, tasked with reversing the company’s recent trend of customer losses. Daniel Schulman, one of Verizon’s directors, took over in October.

The company began staffing cuts of about 13,000 employees in November, in its largest-ever round of layoffs. It was part of Schulman’s plan to reduce the company’s entire cost base aggressively.

Write to Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 15, 2026, print edition as ‘Verizon Fixes Widespread Outage That Affected Over a Million Users’.