Verizon outage affects some Modesto-area customers. Can they still make emergency calls?

A widespread Verizon outage hit mobile phone customers across California and the U.S. on Monday, limiting some residents to emergency phone calls, so-called SOS mode.

Downdetector, a website that crowd-sources reports of such disruptions , showed hundreds of customers in the Sacramento area began reporting outages around 7 a.m. The Modesto area also had some reports, but the total was not available as of noon.

Juan Montes emailed The Modesto Bee to report “a crowd of people looking for help” at the Verizon store on Pelandale Avenue. He said his mother had lost service over the weekend and was told that a cellphone tower was out of service.

The New York-based telecommunications company acknowledged the nationwide problem, and said its engineers were trying to identify and solve it. AT&T suffered a similar outage in February , when tens of thousands of customers temporarily lost service.

Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in the U.S., has 114.2 million wireless retail customers. Revenues surpassed $24 billion in the second quarter of 2024, according to the company.

SOS mode is a fallback

The SOS mode is a fail-safe for iPhones and other smartphone devices when cellphone networks are unavailable , according to Apple.

The phones automatically switch to SOS when the connection fails but allows cellphones to place emergency calls, such as 911, by utilizing other cellphone carrier networks.

Some customers expressed frustration on social media over the outage because it was preventing them from using two-factor authentication. This security measure typically involves sending a verification code to a user’s cellphone when logging into a website.

As a result, these users are unable to access their accounts, including essential services like banking and work emails, as well as their Verizon accounts.

“Also how can I log into my Verizon account if I can’t verify who I am by getting a text because of an outage?” one user wrote on X.