‘Fat fingers’ may have caused Verizon’s network outage, according to analyst

Verizon suffered an outage on Wednesday Which affected 2 million potential customers and lasted more than 8 hours. Late in the evening, the company announced that the outage had been resolved and advised affected customers to reboot their devices to restore connectivity. It also promised these customers a $20 credit.

We do not know what caused the disturbance. Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on this issue.

The company said in a statement that the issue was a “software issue” and that there was no indication that the cause was due to a “cybersecurity issue.” Tech Radar Thursday morning.

The loss of service was unique because of its longevity and because it was not specific to a particular region and affected people throughout the United States, unlike Previous cellular outages. when Natural disasters If cell phone towers go down or equipment malfunctions, the effects are felt in specific cities or areas. We’ve seen reports (and CNET staff shared) of service disruptions in New York; Florida; Hawaii, Los Angeles; Oakland, California; And other remote places.

Until Verizon shares more information, we can piece together some possibilities.

Analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, a communications research firm, suspects a bug in the feature update, based on how devices are affected. “The 5G SA (standalone) core appears to have crashed during a simple feature change,” he wrote to CNET.

Entner noted that the outage was limited to new high-end devices in select markets where the Verizon 5G SA core is deployed, which is why the outage was not felt everywhere. 5G SA core refers to a network that uses only 5G technology and does not rely on the older 4G LTE infrastructure.

Entner also noted that the timing of the outage was unusual. “When carriers do massive upgrades, they do so between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” he said. “The early afternoon onset of the incident suggests there are ‘fat fingers’ for a smaller change to cascade through the system.”

This is a developing story. Follow all the Verizon news on CNET to learn more about the network outage.