Verizon suffered a service outage on Wednesday that affected potentially 2 million customers and lasted 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 reconnect. He also promised those customers a $20 credit.
We don’t know what caused the disruption. Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for clarity on the issue.
The company said the problem was a “software issue” and that there was no indication the cause was due to a “cybersecurity issue” in a statement to TechRadar Thursday morning.
The loss of service was unique due to its longevity and the fact that it was not region specific and affected people across the United States, unlike previous cellular outages. When natural disasters if you take down cell towers or hardware failures occur, the effects are felt in specific cities or areas. We saw reports (and CNET staffers weighed in) that service was down in New York; Florida; Hawaii, Los Angeles; Oakland, California; and other remote locations.
While we wait for Verizon to share more information, we can put together a few possibilities.
Analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, a telecommunications research firm, suspects a feature update went wrong, based on how devices were affected. “It appears their 5G SA (standalone) core failed during a minor feature change,” he wrote to CNET.
Entner noted that the outage was limited to new high-end devices in some markets where Verizon’s 5G SA core is deployed, which is why the outage was not felt everywhere. The term 5G SA core refers to a network that uses only 5G technology and does not rely on legacy 4G LTE infrastructure.
Entner also suggested the timing of the outage was unusual. “When carriers do massive upgrades, they do it between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” he said. “An early crash at midday indicates ‘fat fingers’ for a smaller change that has rippled through the system.”
This is a developing story. Follow all of CNET’s Verizon news for more on the network outage.
