Verizon customers were reporting widespread service disruptions around the country on Wednesday morning, experiencing problems making outgoing calls, texting and browsing the internet.
On social media, customers using the hashtag #verizon and #verizonoutage reported that when they tried to make outgoing calls, they received the message: “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”
It was not clear what caused the disruptions or whether it was related to the winter storms that have swept across large areas of the country.
“Overnight some wireless customers experienced a dialing error when placing calls from their wireless phone to a long-distance landline number,” Chris McCann, a Verizon spokesman, said in a statement. “This issue was resolved at 6:30 a.m. ET. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
On the website DownDetector, a map highlighted in red the most affected areas. They included New York City, Richmond, Chicago, Omaha and Virginia Beach. The outages appeared to start late Tuesday night and continued into Wednesday morning, according to the map, which also indicated disruptions in parts of Florida.
Police departments also shared updates about the outages. Early Wednesday, the Reno police said on Twitter that “Verizon has advised us this is a nationwide outage and there is no estimated ETA for a fix.” The department advised residents that “911 is still for life-threatening emergencies only.”
The Avon Lake Police Department in Ohio also updated residents about connection problems Wednesday morning.
“Verizon Wireless has been made aware of the problem, and they said they were working on it,” the department wrote on Facebook.