By 
Kerry Wan/ZDNET
For those who’re seeing SOS mode in your telephone as we speak, you are not alone. Verizon, the most important wi-fi service in America, is experiencing an enormous outage that is affecting customers throughout the US.
Round 10 a.m. ET, customers reported that they may not name, textual content, or use mobile information. Many added that their telephones have been in SOS mode.
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Telephones enter SOS mode when not linked to their service community, both as a result of they’re in an space with poor protection or due to a technical drawback. Given that the majority of as we speak’s stories are from main cities, this subject appears to be the latter.
Luckily, a telephone in SOS mode can nonetheless make emergency calls, and also you could possibly make some calls and ship texts when you have a Wi-Fi connection.
Shortly earlier than midday, Verizon mentioned in a post on X, “We’re conscious of a difficulty impacting service for some clients. Our engineers are engaged and we’re working rapidly to determine and remedy the difficulty.” The Verizon Help X account appeared to be sending automatic replies to consumer complaints.
A map on DownDetector.com (owned by Ziff Davis, the dad or mum firm of ZDNET) exhibits heavy outages in East Coast cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., and New York, but additionally, to a lesser diploma, in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Greater than 100,000 customers have reported an outage. At 2 p.m., outages have been nonetheless being reported.
DownDetector
Once I used Verizon’s “Check Network Status” device, it confirmed that the whole lot appeared to be functioning usually. My first thought was that this could be associated to break from Hurricane Helen, which ravaged components of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Nevertheless, many individuals affected as we speak by the Verizon drawback aren’t within the storm’s path.
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What are you able to do in case your telephone is caught in SOS mode? In different instances, both restarting the gadget or toggling airplane mode on and off once more helps. In as we speak’s occasion, customers report this does not work, so there does not appear to be a repair in the meanwhile. For those who want any form of connectivity outdoors of an emergency name, you will want to search out Wi-Fi.
As quickly as we get extra particulars on what’s inflicting the difficulty, we’ll replace right here.
Nermeen Nabil Khear