We Now Know What Caused the Verizon Outage

By now, you've no doubt heard about (or experienced yourself) yesterday's massive Verizon outage. For nearly all of Wednesday, roughly two million Verizon customers could not connect to the network, and had to rely on wifi to use their smartphones, which were otherwise stuck in SOS mode. Sure, they could call 911, but they couldn't do much else.

It was an ordeal, one Verizon is literally paying for: The company committed to issuing $20 account credits to affected customers. It might not be as much as some of us think the company should offer, but it's something. And if the $20 isn't a comfort, the fact that the outage is over should be—even if you needed to restart your phone this morning to implement the fix.

The weirdest part of the whole affair was that Verizon didn't initially offer any details about what caused the outage. The company posted throughout yesterday, issuing updates and responding to angry customers, but never shedding light on why their network was down for so many customers. Finally, a day and a half after the outages kicked off, the company has an answer, albeit a partial one.

A software issue caused the Verizon outage, not a cyber attack

According to a statement Verizon sent to our sister site Mashable, the cause of the outage was simply a problem with the company's software. "This was a software issue and we are conducting a full review of what happened," the company said. "As of now, there is no indication that this was a cyber security issue." That last bit is important, as some customers took the outage as evidence of some type of cyber attack. While those worries seem to be unfounded, considering the current state of the world, I understand those fears.

Still, while it's nice to have some sort of explanation, I could do with more details. This wasn't a minor, temporary outage affecting only a limited number of users; customers across the country couldn't connect to Verizon for most of the day. Software issues happen, but they usually don't take down one of the three major carriers in the United States.

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