If you’re a Verizon customer and you’re having trouble making a call or sending a text or using cellular data (okay if you’re having trouble doing anything) on your iPhone, you are not alone. Verizon is currently experiencing a major outage that is affecting many customers across the U.S.
Due to the network being down, affected iPhone users are seeing “SOS” display in their device’s status bar. As noted by an Apple support document, the iPhone displays “SOS whenever the device is not connected to a cellular or WiFi network. However, users can still make emergency calls in the U.S., Australia, and Canada via Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite feature on any iPhone 14 model or later.
If you see SOS or “SOS only” in the status bar, your device can still make emergency calls. If you see No Service or Searching in the status bar on your iPhone or iPad (Wi-Fi + Cellular), your device isn’t connected to a cellular network.
In a statement, Verizon said it is “aware of an issue impacting service for some customers” and it is working to identify the issue and implement a fix.
According to Downdetector, issues with Verizon’s service began popping up earlier in the day across major cities including Chicago, Atlanta and New York. At the time of this writing, Downdetector still showed outages.
We’ll update this space when Verizon says the outage has been resolved.
