Verizon suffered a service outage on Wednesday that affected potentially 2 million customers and dragged on for more than 8 hours. Late in the evening, the company declared the outage resolved and advised affected customers to restart their devices in order to be reconnected. It also promised those customers a $20 credit.
We don’t know what caused the disruption. Verizon didn’t immediately respond to a request for clarity on the issue.
The company did say that the problem was a “software issue” and that there was no indication that the cause was due to a “cybersecurity issue” in a statement to TechRadar Thursday morning.
The loss in service was unique for its longevity and because it wasn’t region-specific and affected people across the US, unlike previous cellular outages. When natural disasters take down cellular towers or hardware failures happen, the effects are felt in specific cities or areas. We saw reports (and CNET staffers chimed in) of service being down in New York; Florida; Hawaii, Los Angeles; Oakland, California; and other far-flung spots.
Until Verizon shares more information, we can piece together some possibilities.
Analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, a telecommunications research firm, suspects that a feature update went awry, based on how devices were affected. “It looks like their 5G SA (Standalone) core went down during a minor feature change,” he wrote to CNET.
Entner noted that the outage was limited to new high-end devices in selected markets where Verizon’s 5G SA core is deployed, which is why the outage wasn’t felt everywhere. The term 5G SA core refers to a network that uses only 5G technology and doesn’t rely on older 4G LTE infrastructure.
Entner also suggested the outage’s timing was unusual. “When carriers do massive upgrades, they do that between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in the morning,” he said. “A noon start for the crash indicates ‘fat fingers’ for a smaller change that cascaded through the system.”
This is a developing story. Follow all of CNET’s Verizon news for more about the network outage.
