On Wednesday, 14 January 2026, at around noon, hundreds of thousands of Verizon subscribers reported a major outage that prevented them from sending texts, making calls, or connecting to mobile data. Verizon later confirmed that the outage– a sudden and significant one – began in the late morning and continued through the early afternoon hours of Wednesday.
The outage affected users in major US cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington D.C., and Chicago, during which users reported their phones going into SOS mode, removing all data and voice capabilities of their phones for hours, save for making emergency calls.
