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By David Shepardson and Harshita Mary Varghese<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) – Verizon Communications said late on Wednesday it was making progress in restoring mobile phone \u200bservice and plans to offer impacted consumers credits for an hours-long outage \u200cthat disrupted calls, texting and internet usage for hundreds of thousands of customers.<\/p>\n
“Today, we let many of our \u200ccustomers down and for that, we are truly sorry,” Verizon said. “Our teams will continue to work through the night until service is restored for all impacted customers.”<\/p>\n
The outage prompted several major cities to advise residents to use other carriers to call emergency services.<\/p>\n
With the \u2060outage more than eight hours \u200cold, the carrier said it was still working to resolve the problem but saw no indication of a cyberattack.<\/p>\n
The company did not \u200ddisclose the scope of the disruption. But Downdetector, which aggregates data on service outages, said more than 180,000 reports had been submitted at the peak. Downdetector said it has received 2.2 million \u200breports over the last 24 hours related to the Verizon service disruption.<\/p>\n
“Our teams \u200cremain fully deployed and are focused on the issue,” Verizon said. “We … remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.”<\/p>\n
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told Reuters after a congressional hearing the agency will review the issue “and take appropriate action.” Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said she would ask the agency to investigate.<\/p>\n
New York City told residents \u2060the outage could affect some users trying to \u200bcall 911 for emergency help. “Call using a device \u200bfrom another carrier, a landline, or go to a police\/fire station to report emergencies,” the city said on X. The District of Columbia \u200dissued a similar alert.<\/p>\n
Some \u2060Verizon customers posted frantic messages on social media seeking updates on service restoration.<\/p>\n
Verizon faced a nationwide wireless outage in late 2024 that impacted over 100,000 users \u2060at its peak. The outage drew the FCC’s attention after several services were affected and iPhone users \u200cwere stuck in “SOS” mode.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by \u200cSahal Muhammed, Bill Berkrot and Cynthia Osterman)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n