Verizon Hit With Outage — Months After $1M Fine Over 911 Failures

Key Takeaways

• Over 100,000 Verizon customers were unable to make or receive calls on Monday.
• Verizon has been affected by a string of major outages in recent years.
• In July, the carrier agreed to pay $1 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission investigation into 911 call failures.

Verizon’s mobile network experienced significant disruption on Monday, Sept. 30, with users across the United States affected by the outage. 

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.

Over 100,000 Customers Affected by Downtime

In the latest Verizon outage, Downdetector registered a huge spike in reported issues starting at around 10:00 a.m. ET.

Network disruption lasted for around 8 hours, with over 100,000 customers across the country reporting persistent downtime.

Later in the day, Verizon said  its engineers had fixed the issue and restored normal service.

However, the company’s social media post about the outage has been flooded with frustrated customers who were materially affected by the incident.

Users reported being unable to work and losing out on business because they couldn’t connect to the wireless network. Others called for refunds or compensation.

What Caused Verizon Outage?

While Verizon has not offered an explanation of what caused the outage or responded to CCN’s questions, there are indications that some kind of software bug may be to blame. 

If there had been a problem with individual towers, service would not have been affected nationwide. The company’s recommendation that affected customers restart their devices also points to a software issue.

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.

About the Author

James Morales

Although his background is in crypto and FinTech news, these days, James likes to roam across CCN’s editorial breadth, focusing mostly on digital technology. Having always been fascinated by the latest innovations, he uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.

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