Verizon Faces Yet Another Outage After $1M Fine for 911 Failures

Key Takeaways

• Thousands of Verizon home internet customers reported being unable to get online on Monday.
• The incident follows a nationwide module network outage last month.
• In July, the carrier agreed to pay $1 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission investigation into 911 call failures.

Verizon customers experienced significant disruption for the second time in a month on Monday, Oct. 14, with internet users in multiple locations across the  United States reporting issues

The latest incident comes just a few months after Verizon was slapped with a $1.05 million penalty by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) relating to 911 downtime that prevented hundreds of emergency calls from connecting in six states.

Verizon’s Outage History

While the FCC’s intervention relates to specific 911 failures, in a news release  confirming the settlement, the agency highlighted Verizon’s history of downtime, observing that the December 2022 911 outage “was similar to one that Verizon Wireless experienced in October 2022.”

In its report  into Verizon’s failures, the FCC noted that a Verizon employee reapplied a security policy update file that was known to be flawed.

“Verizon Wireless was aware that the version of the security policy update file that caused the Outage was related to the root cause of the outage that occurred in October,” the report stated.

“Due to insufficient naming convention protocols and a failure to follow then-current implementation protocols, the flawed security policy update file was reintroduced into the Verizon Wireless network.”

Prior to the 2022 incidents, the FCC issued a report on a 2021 “hardware failure” in California during which over 8.9 million calls weren’t connected. In that case, however, emergency calls weren’t affected.

Thousands of Customers Affected by Downtime

In the latest Verizon outage, DownDetector  registered a spike in reported issues starting at around 7:00 p.m. ET with more than 10,000 customers reporting problems mostly related 5G home internet,

The outage follows an even worse incident on Sept. 30 when mobile network disruption lasted for around 8 hours and over 100,000 customers across the country reported persistent downtime.

What Caused Verizon Outage?

Verizon has not made any public comments on the cause of the disruption. However, reports online  suggest a DDoS attack may have been to blame.

Whereas September’s outage was broadly distributed across the country, the latest incident appears to have mostly affected the New York and New Jersey areas. This suggests a problem with local infrastructure could be at fault.

However, a software problem can’t be ruled out.

In 2022, a faulty security update caused both major outages. Because of the layered nature of modern technology stacks, such patches can behave unexpectedly if bugs aren’t identified before implementation.

For example, a CrowdStrike security patch was identified as the root cause of a major Windows crash in July that led to major disruption across the travel, finance, and media sectors.