Verizon Confirms Widespread 4G Outage, Still Scrambling For A Fix

Just in time to throw a wrench into people’s wireless shopping plans, Verizon has announced that their much-vaunted 4G LTE network is experiencing a few hiccups. And by hiccups, I mean that their 4G network is currently undergoing a widespread outage that’s affecting customers across the country.

According to a recent release, “Verizon Wireless engineers have been working to resolve an issue with 4G LTE service that is affecting some customers’ 4G devices,” and that “3G data and voice devices are unaffected.” However, that doesn’t exactly seem to be the case for everyone affected: reports are floating around on blogs and Verizon’s customer forums that some people are without so much as a 3G or 1X connection. Stranger still, some customers are completely fine with everything working as it should.

Verizon’s 4G flakiness seemed to begin last night when some 4G devices (like the Droid RAZR in particular) began to exhibit SIM card authorization errors. Those issues apparently continue to plague Verizon certain customers today, and one of my retail sources tells me that some new Verizon 4G devices can’t be activated because of the network outage, which is the last thing Verizon needs going into holiday crunch time.

At present, Verizon has no comment on when to expect service to be restored, but we’ll keep you posted as the situation develops.