Verizon’s massive nationwide network outage on Wednesday may have been caused by a failure in just one East Coast state.
Officials believe a network server in New Jersey going down was the likely trigger of the day-long network crash, according to an initial investigation by law enforcement agencies on the East Coast searching for signs of sabotage.
Many people on social media immediately began to speculate that the hours-long network disruption switching cell phones into SOS mode was caused by a cyberattack.
New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan has called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open a probe into the outage, but no signs of tampering or hacking by cybercriminals have been found so far.
However, James Knight of DigitalWarfare.com told the Daily Mail that cyberwarfare experts are very suspicious about this outage being able to spread across the entire US within minutes.
‘True single-point failures shouldn’t cascade this way in a properly engineered system, and the silence on exact causes only heightens doubts,’ Knight explained.
Knight added Verizon’s ‘built-in redundancies,’ including spread out data centers, constant system tests, and multiple routing paths for signals, should have prevented this kind of long-term and widespread service blackout.
‘That said, there are no credible signs or evidence this was cyberwarfare, a cyberattack, or foreign interference,’ the cyberwarfare expert noted.
Tens of thousands of Verizon customers had their phones switching into SOS mode due to a network outage on Wednesday (Stock Image)
While Verizon’s network failure mirrored a 2024 AT&T outage that was blamed on ‘internal software’ problems, Knight called the timing ‘suspicious’ based on the geopolitical tensions between the US and adversaries like China and Iran.
‘Everyone I’ve spoken to is either tight lipped or suspicious,’ he told Daily Mail.
Despite the timing, no groups or nations have claimed responsibility for any kind of potential attack on Verizon’s server, which Knight said would have been typical for disruptive actors seeking visibility for a major hack.
The telecommunications giant has yet to provide any details on the mysterious blackout, leaving customers without the ability to make calls or send text messages.
In a statement on their social media accounts at 10.20pm ET, Verizon posted: ‘The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network.’
Despite the update, some customers have continued to report issues with Verizon’s service lasting well past midnight and into Thursday morning.
‘I have some data now, but absolutely no call goes through.. says call failed. It’s been almost a full 24 hours and this is ridiculous,’ one Verizon customer reported at 9.10am ET.
Daily Mail has reached out to Verizon for comment on the ongoing repairs and is awaiting a response.
A Verizon worker repairs a network tower during service disruptions
According to outage-tracking website Down Detector, the network began to break down just before 12 noon on Wednesday.
Within an hour, there were more than 180,000 reports from across the US saying that their mobile phone had gone into SOS mode, meaning they had no connection to Verizon’s network and could only make emergency calls to 911 and send emergency texts.
Major cities along the East Coast, including New York and Washington DC, appeared to be the hardest hit areas, with customers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle also reporting widespread outages.
Although Verizon began providing a series of updates on their efforts to fix the network issues starting just after 2pm, none of the company’s social media posts revealed the specific issue, calling it a ‘service issue’ and ‘service interruption.’
Daily Mail’s attempts to contact Verizon on Wednesday were not answered, and an automated message said the company was dealing with ‘an emergency condition.’
