What caused the nationwide Verizon outage? It could take months for the public to learn

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- It was mostly quiet at the Verizon stores in Milwaukee's Third Ward and Lower East Side neighborhoods Monday evening. The lack of foot traffic was a sharp contrast from the lines at Verizon stores across the country when an outage affecting customers nationwide was at its peak.

According to the user-driven website, Down Detector, more than 105,000 people reported a Verizon outage around 10 a.m. Monday.

As of 4:30 p.m., a Verizon spokesperson said engineers were making progress on a network issue. By 7 p.m., the spokesperson sent an update stating, "Verizon engineers have fully restored today's network disruption that impacted some customers. Service has returned to normal levels."

The update suggested if customers were still having service issues, they should restart their phones.

The outage left affected customers unable to make calls or send text messages. People reported having their phones stuck in "SOS" mode, where they were still able to make emergency calls.

Robert Wahl, an associate professor of computer science at Concordia University in Mequon, said he suspected an internal technical problem is likely what caused the outage.

"It could just be network congestion that caused the problem, but that's not a very likely scenario," he said. "It was a typical Monday today. There wasn't anything unusual about today."

Wahl compared the outage to a February AT&T outage that federal officials later said affected more than 125 million devices and blocked more than 92 million phone calls during a 12-hour period before service was fully restored. 

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report on that outage happened after a "network change with an equipment configuration error."

"It could be an upgrade, a software change that could've caused this, or tower upgrade," Whal said. "And software problems have caused this kind of thing in the past."

Wahl said it's unlikely Verizon will publicly share the findings of its review of Monday's outage. He said it's common for tech and telecommunications companies to be tight-lipped when such problems occur.

"So, whether it's a natural disaster or some internal glitch or a cyber-attack, [Verizon] probably will not be really forthcoming with disclosing this," Wahl said. "And it's not just them."

Wahl said he expected the FCC to conduct an investigation similar to what it did after the AT&T outage. In that case, the FCC report came out five months after the outage.

"They'll do their own independent investigation aside from what Verizon is doing right now for themselves, and that's good," he said. "We'll hear from them eventually."