Is your phone in S.O.S. mode?

UPDATE AS OF 8:20AM 

The outage lasted over 10 hours and is believed to have affected tens of thousands of people all over the US. 

The outage was finally resolved around 10:24pm but if you are still experiencing issues, it's being advised that you restart your device. 

Verizon took to their social media to apologize to their customers and also let them know that credits will be issued - 

The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network. For those affected, we will provide account credits. Details will be shared directly with customers. We sincerely apologize for the…

— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) January 15, 2026

What caused the actual outage is still unknown at this time, however Verizon did say that they would provide an "update soon".

UPDATED AT 5:10PM

Originally it was believed that roughly 175,000 customers were affected by the network outage. As of 3:30pm this afternoon, that number dropped to around 60,000.

Just after 4pm Verizon posted this on their social media - 

Verizon's team is on the ground actively working to fix today’s service issue that is impacting some customers. We know this is a huge inconvenience, and our top priority is to get you back online and connected as fast as possible. We appreciate your patience while we work to…

— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) January 14, 2026

UPDATED:

While Verizon engineers are working on the issue there are a few things you can try to get your phone out of S.O.S. mode - 

 - Put your phone in Airplane mode, give it a minute or two, and then turn Airplane mode off. (we've heard from a few people that this worked for them)

 - Try rebooting your phone 

If Verizon happens to be your cell carrier, you might be dealing with an issue today. 

Around 11am today, a lot of issues were being reported about their phone being stuck in S.O.S mode by customers. 

Verizon Support did post this on their official "X" account - 

We are aware of the outages impacting our customers and are working diligently to resolve this and get all of our customers reliable service again. Thank you for your patience. -Jaquetta

— Verizon Support (@VerizonSupport) January 14, 2026

This is not something that is isolated to The Capital Region, there are reports from all over the US coming in that the network is down. As of now, there is no estimated time for the issue to be resolved. We'll keep an eye on the situation and let you know when we hear anything worth telling you.