By Patience Haggin

Verizon Communications apologized Wednesday for hourslong outages that prevented customers from making calls and sending messages.

The issue, which started at around noon Eastern time, affected wireless voice and data services for some customers, particularly in the eastern half of the country, a Verizon spokesman said.

"Today, we let many of our customers down, and for that we are truly sorry," the spokesman said. The company said it was making progress in restoring service and would continue to work through the night. It plans to provide account credits to affected customers.

Over one million reports were submitted claiming problems with Verizon service within the past 24 hours, according to Downdetector, an outage-tracking site. The crisis reached a peak of more than 178,000 concurrent reports early Wednesday afternoon, according to a Downdetector spokeswoman. That is many more reports than in a typical day.

Not all Verizon customers were affected, and reports of the outages were scattered nationally, with many concentrated in the metro areas of New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and Miami, according to the site.

Verizon named a new chief executive this past fall, tasked with reversing the company's recent trend of customer losses. Daniel Schulman, one of Verizon's directors, took over in October.

The company began staffing cuts of about 13,000 employees in November, in its largest-ever round of layoffs. It was part of Schulman's plan to reduce the company's entire cost base aggressively.

Write to Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 14, 2026 21:55 ET (02:55 GMT)

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