Is Verizon down for you? A massive outage sends phones across the US into SOS mode

If you see SOS mode on your phone today, you are not alone. Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in America, is experiencing a massive outage affecting users across the United States.

Around 10 a.m. ET, users reported that they were unable to make phone calls, send text messages, or use cellular data. Many added that their phones were in SOS mode.

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Phones enter SOS mode when they are not connected to their carrier's network, either because they are in an area with poor coverage or because there is a technical problem. Given that most of today's reports come from large cities, this appears to be the latter.

Fortunately, a phone in SOS mode can still make emergency calls, and you may be able to make some calls and send text messages if you have a Wi-Fi connection.

Just before noon, Verizon said in a post on the Verizon Support X account appeared to be sending automated responses to user complaints.

A map on DownDetector.com (owned by Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company) shows severe outages in East Coast cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina and New York, but also to a lesser extent in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles , San Francisco and Phoenix. More than 100,000 users have reported an outage. Outages were still being reported as of 2 p.m.

When I used Verizon's Check Network Status tool, everything seemed to be working normally. My first thought was that this might be related to the damage from Hurricane Helen, which devastated parts of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. However, many people affected by the Verizon problem today are not in the path of the storm.

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What can you do if your phone gets stuck in SOS mode? In other cases, either restarting the device or turning airplane mode on and off helps. In today's case, users are reporting that this doesn't work, so there doesn't seem to be a solution at this time. If you need any kind of connectivity outside of an emergency call, you'll need to find WiFi.

As soon as we receive more details about the cause of the issue, we will update here.