Verizon customers across the United States are reporting widespread outages on Monday morning, potentially dealing a serious setback to hurricane recovery efforts in America's southeast.
Reports of widespread outages being experienced by Verizon customers began emerging at around 9am EDT, with notes of both voice and data being unavailable for some customers, but not all.
While many of the outages were reported in regions dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, they haven't been confined to those areas, with Down Detector's heat map indicating outages in California, Arizona, and other western states as well.
"We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers," a Verizon spokesperson told The Register. "Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue."
Verizon has reported widespread damage to its network in Helene's aftermath, but it has noted an additional problem that might be behind the outage: Cables being cut during recovery efforts.
"Fiber is the invisible footprint that moves data throughout Verizon's network across the country and around the world," Verizon said on its hurricane recovery page.
"Cutting those cables when digging can result in customers losing service and data connections being lost," the Tier 1 carrier added, urging anyone doing storm cleanup to call local officials before digging and potentially causing further network damage.
Outages at T-Mobile and AT&T were reported today as well, and in many of the same geographic regions as the Verizon outages. We've reached out to both companies to learn more.
This story will be updated as more information is available.
Source: The register