Large Verizon Outage Resolved After Impacting Washington Customers

KING COUNTY, WA — Officials in King and Pierce County on Wednesday cautioned residents with Verizon Wireless that a large outage may impact their ability to contact 911. King County and South Sound agencies shared information on social media just before 3 p.m. King County advised residents with emergencies to try Text-to-911, a landline, or a phone from another cell carrier.

South Sound 911 reiterated that 911 service was not down, and the problem was on Verizon's end. Residents were also advised not to call 911 to test if their phone was working.

Similar impacts were confirmed in communities throughout the nation, with reports of a potentially widespread outage coming in just after noon around Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver and New York. According to the website Downdetector, outage reports peaked around 1:30 p.m., with nearly 24,000 users confirming an outage.

In a statement shared with Patch late Wednesday afternoon, Verizon said a technical issue led to network outages and recommended that customers who were still struggling to connect restart their phones.

"A fiber issue in the core of the network caused some of our customers to experience intermittent outages today," a spokesperson wrote. "The issue was identified and resolved by Verizon engineers and the majority of impacted customers should be seeing service as usual. If any customer is still experiencing lingering issues, please restart your device. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."