A massive, day-long nationwide network outage that struck Verizon customers across the United States on Wednesday is believed to have been triggered by the failure of just one server on the East Coast.
What Caused the Widespread Disruption?
According to an initial investigation by federal and local officials, the likely source of the crash was a network server located in New Jersey. The telecommunications behemoth has remained tight-lipped, offering no specific details about the mysterious blackout that forced countless mobile phones into SOS-only mode.
This emergency setting left customers unable to make standard calls or send text messages, severely disrupting communication. The outage began to unfold just before 12 noon ET on Wednesday, as reported by the outage-tracking website Down Detector.
Customer Impact and Frustration
Within an hour of the initial problems, Down Detector had logged more than 180,000 reports from users across the country. Major cities along the East Coast, including New York and Washington DC, appeared to be the epicentres of the disruption.
However, the issue was far from localised, with significant numbers of customers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle also reporting widespread service loss.
Customer frustration mounted as the hours passed. Verizon finally issued a statement on its social media accounts at 10.20pm ET, declaring: 'The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network.'
Despite this update, numerous users continued to report problems well past midnight and into Thursday morning. One customer reported at 9.10am ET: 'I have some data now, but absolutely no call goes through.. says call failed. It’s been almost a full 24 hours and this is ridiculous.'
Cyberattack Fears Dismissed
The hours-long disruption immediately sparked speculation on social media that a malicious cyberattack could be behind the failure. However, the preliminary investigation has found no evidence of tampering or hacking by cybercriminals.
Throughout the crisis, Verizon's communications were vague, referring only to a 'service issue' and 'service interruption' in its updates. Attempts by the Daily Mail to contact the company for comment on Wednesday were met with an automated message stating Verizon was dealing with 'an emergency condition.'
This remains a developing story, and further details from Verizon's own internal investigation are awaited.
