Thousands of Verizon customers reported problems with their cell service Friday afternoon, as the company acknowledged “intermittent issues” that prevented some people from making or receiving phone calls.
A company spokesman said text and data services had not been affected. The company has not released information about the cause of the outages. “We’re aware of intermittent issues that are preventing some customers from making or receiving phone calls,” Verizon spokesman Andrew Testa said in an email.
“Our network teams are in the process of restoring service as quickly as possible.” The number of reported Verizon outages started spiking around 1 p.m. Eastern time Friday and grew to more than 14,000 outages by 2:14, according to Downdetector.
About 85 percent of them affected mobile phone service, as opposed to the Internet. Dozens of people on social media described Verizon phones as unable to send or receive calls in Eastern U.S. states including New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
