Last month, Verizon’s massive network outage prevented thousands of customers from making calls or using their mobile data for over 10 hours. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now asking the public to share how this outage impacted them, inviting comments as part of its investigation into the incident.
Verizon outage may have impacted 911 calls
Seeking information from individuals and businesses alike, the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has requested information from the public about their personal experiences of the Jan. 14 Verizon outage. This includes whether Verizon customers were able to send or receive messages and calls, how long service was disrupted, and whether people on other networks were able to contact them.
In particular, the FCC is interested to know if anyone experienced issues calling 911 during the Verizon outage. In theory, emergency calls should be able to connect to any mobile tower during a network outage, ensuring that calls for help still go through. In practice, this may not have happened.
As Mashable reported at the time (cited in the FCC’s public notice), multiple official emergency services advised that 911 calls might not connect while Verizon’s outage was ongoing, advising people to seek help via alternate means. Some social media users further claimed that they had attempted to call emergency services during the outage, but were unable to connect.
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As such, the FCC would like to hear of anyone who was unable to contact 911 due to Verizon’s outage, and if any harm or injury resulted due to this. It is also seeking input from those on the other end of the line, asking first responders and governments about the impact of Verizon’s outage on services and public safety.
If you want to submit a comment, you can do so online via the FCC’s electronic comment filing system or by directly emailing a description of your Verizon outage experience to [email protected]. The FCC is accepting submissions until March 16.
Verizon’s January outage has been labelled one of the U.S.’ worst in the 2020s thus far. The only other comparable outage was AT&T’s in Feb. 2024, which lasted for at least 12 hours and caused approximately 25,000 emergency calls to fail.
Australia also experienced a similar issue last September, when a massive outage of major telecommunications company Optus rendered customers unable to call emergency services. Over 600 emergency calls failed to connect during Optus’ 13-hour outage, with at least four people confirmed to have died after attempts to contact help did not go through.
