Verizon says massive outage has been resolved

Verizon said late Wednesday that it has resolved an hours-long outage that impacted tens of thousands of customers of the wireless carrier.

The service interruption lasted for more than seven hours. According to DownDetector, the biggest impacts were felt in New York City, Atlanta, Miami, Houston and Charlotte, North Carolina.

DownDetector, which aggregates data on service outages, said more than 1.5 million Verizon customers reported wireless and data outages on Wednesday.

At least 178,284 Verizon customers were affected at one point, the website reported.

Verizon, the nation’s largest wire carrier, has more than 146 million customers, NBC News reported.

“Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry,” the company said in a statement posted on social media. “They expect more from us.”

Verizon did not reveal the cause and scope of the service disruption, but added that there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

“The outage has been resolved,” Verizon said in a statement. “If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network.”

Lee W. McKnight, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, who researches wireless grids, told The New York Times that network outages like the one affecting Verizon were more likely to be caused by a software configuration problem or human error than a cyberattack.

McKnight added that telecommunications companies often do not adequately train their employees to deal with software issues.

“They haven’t adjusted their training to deal with the current reality,” he told the newspaper. “One little mistake and it takes out whatever happened today.”

The outage left many customers without the ability to make phone calls, send text messages or use data, CNN reported. On social media sites, some customers reported their cellphones were in SOS mode or without access to service.

On Wednesday, Verizon said that it would give account credits to customers affected by the outage.

The FCC said it was aware of the outage, NBC News reported.

“We are continuing to monitor the situation,” the agency said in a statement.

Krispy Kreme took advantage of Verizon’s problems, offering customers a free glazed doughnut for two hours on Wednesday to ease their frustrations about connectivity issues.

“SOS got you down?” the doughnut chain wrote on social media. “We can hear you now — and we’re serving up.”

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