Verizon restores service in Twin Cities area after thousands affected nationally

Verizon has restored service to Twin Cities customers who experienced an outage Monday.

“Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored,” the company posted on its X account. “We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”

The company has not said specifically what the problem was, but it affected customers coast to coast. Locally, more than 2,600 customers in the Twin Cities reported outages, according to Downdetector.com, which monitors outages for telecommunications providers and other businesses. Just seven customers were still in the dark as of 6 p.m.

The website reported more than 105,000 customers unable to access Verizon’s network at the peak of the outage, which began about 8:30 a.m. Twin Cities time. By noon, the numbers had begun to drop, according to Downdetector.com.

Most of those unable to make calls were still able to make emergency calls as phones were still functional in SOS mode. Customers posting on Downdetector.com reported outages in Lakeville, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Vadnais Heights, Anoka, Eden Prairie and Elk River.

Verizon has 114.2 million subscribers in the United States.

In addition to Monday’s outage, the carrier also is dealing with impacts caused by Hurricane Helene.

“While we have been successful in restoring service in Florida and parts of Georgia and South Carolina, we continue to experience service impacts in parts of the Southeast due to prolonged power outages, massive flooding, access restrictions, and extensive fiber damage,” Verizon said in a statement posted online Sunday evening.