New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan called on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the hourslong service outage.

A major Verizon outage appeared to impact customers across the United States starting around noon ET on Wednesday. Calls to Verizon customers from other carriers may also be impacted.

Verizon says it's working to restore service. But if your Verizon device still shows "SOS" instead of service bars, you're affected by today's outage.

In short, when you see SOS on your phone, it means you're not connected to a cellular network. "If you see SOS or 'SOS only' in the status bar, your device isn't connected to your cellular network, but you can still make emergency calls through other carrier networks," reads an Apple support page on the feature.

Many Verizon customers are experiencing a major outage on Wednesday, disrupting calling and cellular services across the U.S.

Verizon responded to user complaints about a massive outage on Wednesday. According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, more than 170,000 users complained about issues. As per Downdetector, more reported locations included: New York City, Kailua-Kona, Forest Grove, Portland, Chicago, Brooklyn, Hilo, Richmond and Virginia Beach.

In September 2025, and again in October 2025, many Verizon mobile customers experienced mobile outages, which Verizon eventually attributed to software issues. A previous service disruption in 2024 sent some Verizon customers' phones into SOS mode, as in this 2026 outage.