Tens of thousands of Verizon users reported outages for the wireless carrier’s services across the U.S. on Monday, with Chicago and Indianapolis among the hardest-hit cities and some iPhone users stuck in “SOS” mode.
According to tracking website Downdetector.com, the outage began at around 9:30 a.m. ET and there were 66,761 reports as of 12:28 p.m. ET, with regions including Minneapolis, Phoenix, Omaha, and Denver among the most reported locations.
Verizon Communications said it was aware of an issue impacting its services. “Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
Some Verizon users said on social media platform X their phones were stuck in “SOS” mode.
“SOS” appears in the status bars of iPhones if the device is not connected to a cellular network but can still make emergency calls through other carriers, according to Apple’s website.
The outage tracking website also showed 1,111 incident reports by AT&T users as of 12:25 p.m ET, but the carrier said it was not experiencing a nationwide outage and the network was operating normally.
“Downdetector is likely reflecting challenges our customers are having attempting to connect to users on another network,” AT&T said in a post on X.
