At the Verizon Wireless store on Osos Street in San Luis Obispo on Monday, concerned Verizon customers lined up waiting to get their questions answered.
A Verizon service outage was frustrating for some customers like Jeff Borges who runs his own contracting business.
“I looked at my phone and I thought, 'Boy, it's sure quiet today,'” Borges said.
He uses his Verizon-serviced cell phone for work.
“I have literally no way of connecting with my employees or my clients and they're probably wondering what happened to this guy,” Borges said.
The San Luis Obispo County Office of Emergency Services says the issue is a sporadic outage, meaning some customers are impacted and others are not.
Verizon has 114.2 million subscribers in the United States. Early Monday afternoon, there were approximately 100,000 outage reports from Verizon customers on DownDetector, a site that tracks complaints about service outages.
“You kind of feel like you’re disconnected when you can't use your phone,” another Verizon customer said.
“We don't realize how dependent we are as a society to our electronics,” Borges added.
Shannon Abbott said she needed her phone to catch her flight back home to Utah.
“My phone was on SOS so I tried to do all the troubleshooting that you're supposed to do for SOS thinking it was my phone since my son’s phone is kind of still working fine,” Abbott said.
In a statement on X Monday morning, Verizon said it was aware of the issue impacting some of its customers and that engineers were working quickly to resolve the issue.
Borges said he’ll be making some changes to prevent an outage like this from impacting him the same way in the future.
“It motivated me to want to get another carrier and have a second phone dedicated to my business," he said.
According to the Office of Emergency Services for San Luis Obispo County, even with the outage, calls to 911 should still go through.
