Verizon outage causing big disruptions. Here’s how the Fresno region is being impacted
.JPG "The Verizon logo outside a store, Wednesday, July 14, 2021, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)")
UPDATE (4:32 p.m.): On its Facebook page, the Fresno Police Department says Verizon has advised that customers may be able to restore their service by turning off and restarting their phones. A Verizon spokesperson said a “fiber issue in the core of the (company’s) network” was the source of the problem.
‘The issue was identified and resolved by Verizon engineers and the majority of impacted customers should be seeing service as usual,” said Liz Maly, a communications manager for Verizon. “If any customer is still experiencing lingering issues, please restart your device.”
Original story:
Fresno-area customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s biggest wireless phone companies, are experiencing an outage of service that is affecting their ability to make phone calls on the carrier’s network.
Some of the earliest indications of a problem surfaced at about 2 p.m. Wednesday. Several local law enforcement agencies, including the Fresno and Clovis police departments, posted updates on their social media platforms alerting the public to problems, and media reports indicate that the problems may be affecting other parts of California and the country.
“Verizon cell phone service is currently down,” the Fresno Police Department stated on its Facebook page. “Verizon customers can still dial 9-1-1. However, if our dispatch receives a 9-1-1 hangup, our Emergency Services Dispatchers will be unable to call back.”
The department added that non-emergency calls from Verizon customers are not working, and recommended that residents use a landline phone to make non-emergency reports to police.
“We are aware of an issue impacting voice calls for some Verizon customers,” Verizon spokesperson Liz Maly said in an email to The Fresno Bee. “Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”
Maly did not respond to questions about how widespread the problems are or how many customers are affected.
But a real-time heat map maintained by outage.report shows that customer reports of Verizon outages not only affect much of California, but also parts of Washington state and other areas of the western U.S.
This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 4:25 PM.
