WASHINGTON — Customers of multiple cell phone companies reported outages across the country Wednesday afternoon, an issue that appeared to be centered on problems with Verizon's network.
On DownDetector.com -- a website where people can self-report service disruptions -- reports of outages began to increase starting around 3:15 p.m. ET. Outage spikes were reported by customers of multiple carriers.
Often times, this can be a case of somebody with one carrier not able to reach a phone number for someone with a different carrier. But they may report it as a problem with their own provider.
"A fiber issue in the core of the network caused some of our customers to experience intermittent call failures today," Verizon said in a statement. "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."
T-Mobile said in a statement it confirmed customers were able to place calls, though some calls to Verizon numbers might not go through. AT&T also confirmed that its service was operating normally.
On Twitter, one user using Verizon said they were able to send text messages but couldn't receive or make phone calls. When calling they would receive a message saying the number "is non-working or unavailable," the user wrote.
