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By Jenni Fink and Hannah Parry
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T‑Mobile and Verizon users across the country complained Monday afternoon about being unable to use their phones during a reported outage, with many receiving SOS messages indicating they had no service.
As of 8:40 p.m. ET, fewer than 7,000 reports were submitted, according to the website, a large drop from 5:06 p.m. ET, when more than 60,000 outage reports had been submitted for T‑Mobile on DownDetector. A heat map showed the highest concentration of complaints coming from New York City, Columbia, South Carolina, Springfield, Ohio, Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis.
At the same time, Verizon users also reported problems, according to DownDetector’s user‑submitted data. The site showed spikes in complaints about mobile service disruptions, though at lower volume than T‑Mobile. In a post to X Monday night, Verizon said, "Our network is operating normally nationwide. If you're having trouble reaching someone, it may be due to the reported outage on T-Mobile's network."
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AT&T users were also reporting issues on DownDetector; however, the number of reports decreased as quickly as it increased.
On X Monday evening, T-Mobile said on X, "Our teams are actively working on the reports of technical challenges impacting some customers. Any service impacts are in the process of being resolved and are our highest priority. We know how critical it is to stay connected and every available resource is focused on resolving this as quickly as possible."
Newsweek reached out to T‑Mobile and Verizon for comment but did not receive responses in time for publication.
What Does SOS Mean on Cell Phone?
When an iPhone displays “SOS” or “SOS Only” in the status bar, it means the device is not connected to its regular cellular network but can still make emergency calls through another available carrier. The feature is designed as a safety measure, allowing users to contact emergency services such as 911 even when they have no normal cell service.
The alert can appear if a user is in an area with poor reception, experiencing a carrier outage, or having issues with their SIM card or network settings. While in SOS mode, regular calls, texts and mobile data typically will not work until the phone reconnects to its carrier network.
T-Mobile Outage Map
A map from DownDetector shows major cities experiencing the largest outages. People commenting on the website said they were experiencing outages in various cities, including Seattle, West Sacramento, California, Irvine, California, Albuquerque, Orlando and St. Louis.
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Verizon Outage Map
A map of reported Verizon problems shows clusters of user complaints across the United States over the past 24 hours, according to outage‑tracking service DownDetector.
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The map highlights where disruptions have been most concentrated, with scattered reports appearing throughout the day. DownDetector notes that it flags an incident only when the volume of complaints rises significantly above the typical level for that period, indicating a potential service interruption rather than routine fluctuations in user activity.
Expert Weighs In
Roger Entner, analyst and founder at Recon Analytics, which advises telecom, media, and technology companies on strategic and tactical business issues, told Newsweek that a nationwide disruption of this scale almost always pointed to a core network issue.
"Because everything else would be a localized outage. Most likely caused by an upgrade that cascaded through the network," he explained.
"Third party routing would affect connections to other carriers. Here phones are taken off the network but not all."
Entner said that T-Mobile engineers would have spent the first 10-15 minutes, known as the initial triage window, quickly trying to identify "what changed and try to stop it spreading. Then they undo it."
"The networks are mostly software like our computers now and they are rolling back the change," he added.
Entner said that, for consumers, it could be almost impossible to tell the difference between a localized outage and a core network outage because for them, it had the same outcome: "The phone doesn't connect. Network outage services like down detector are not pinging like mad for a tower."
He said that while these outages were infrequent but happened to every carrier at some point.
"Every carrier has infrequent outages. Happens every few years, but is uncommon," he said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Samantha Beech, Gray R. Thomas, and Anna Commander
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