FCC probing Verizon mobile network outage for thousands of users in US

By Harshita Mary Varghese and David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was investigating a Verizon network outage across the United States after thousands of users reported outages.

Chicago and Seattle were among the hardest-hit cities and some iPhone users were stuck in "SOS" mode.

According to tracking website Downdetector.com, the outage began at around 9:30 a.m. ET and there were 28,842 reports as of 5:02 p.m. ET, with regions including Minneapolis, Phoenix, Omaha and Denver among the most reported areas being affected.

Verizon Communications said its engineers were making progress on the network issue and service has started to be restored.

"We apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today," Verizon said, without providing further details on the reason behind the outage.

There were about 105,000 reports around 11:19 a.m. ET, at the peak of the outage, according to Downdetector.com.

The FCC said it was "working to determine the cause and extent of these service disruptions."

Some Verizon users said on social media platform X that their phones were stuck in "SOS" mode.

"SOS" appears in the status bars of iPhones if the device is not connected to a cellular network but can still make emergency calls through other carriers, according to Apple's website.

The outage tracking website also showed 448 incident reports by AT&T users as of 5:15 p.m ET, but the carrier said it was not experiencing a nationwide outage and the network was operating normally.

"Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers are having attempting to connect to users on another network," AT&T said.

Sector rival AT&T faced nationwide wireless outages in February that lasted over 12 hours and impacted more than 70,000 customers.

The FCC is investigating the AT&T outage which blocked more than 92 million voice calls and prevented more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911, the agency said.

News of the Verizon outage comes hours after the company announced a deal to give infrastructure firm Vertical Bridge rights to lease, operate and manage 6,339 mobile towers across the United States for $3.3 billion.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Anil D'Silva, Tasim Zahid, Devika Syamnath and Mark Porter)