On Sept. 30, 2024, millions were left without service as Verizon faced a major nationwide outage. Starting around 9:30 a.m., thousands of people reported their signal being out, including me and other students at McPherson High School.

Ava Youngblood, a McPherson High School student, was impacted by this Verizon outage. 

Youngblood, like thousands of other customers impacted by the outage, reported her phone not working around 11 a.m.

¨I had gotten on my phone around fourth hour, and I couldn’t do anything. The phone displayed the SOS signal, and I couldn’t text.¨ she explained, ¨I needed to text my family, and I couldn’t.” 

Youngblood emphasized this outage’s impact, claiming it’s reckless and dangerous. ¨What if something bad happened, and I couldn’t reach my mom? I didn’t receive service until around 7 p.m.¨

The Verizon outage went for as long as 10 hours. Around 7 p.m. Eastern time, Verizon said, “Verizon engineers have fully restored today’s network disruption that impacted some customers.”

According to Natalie Neysa Alund, a reporter from USA Today, “News of the Verizon outage came hours after the company announced a deal to give infrastructure firm Vertical Bridge rights to lease, operate, and manage 6,339 mobile towers across the U.S. for $3.3 billion.”

While interviewing Youngblood, I questioned whether she has a new perspective on Verizon, and if she would change her cellular plan. ¨Since it took so long to get my service back, I´m more suspicious of continuing my plan, but I just got my new phone, and it´s almost impossible to change my service right now.¨

After 10 p.m., Verizon was fully restored and working normally again. Customers of Verizon were left annoyed and disappointed with how long it took to restore the service and issue a statement. As of Oct. 4th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is still investigating what caused the nationwide outage.