Here’s How to Fix Your Phone Now That Verizon Says the Outage Is Resolved

If you have Verizon, yesterday may have been a little chaotic. The wireless carrier’s coverage was out across much of the country for much of the day, leading to confusion, frustration and, for some, conspiracy theories. I’ve seen some users on It’s good to know that during times of service interruption, we can all keep a cool head.

But despite claims to the contrary, the world didn’t end yesterday and Verizon has fixed the problem. The company released a statement at 10:20 p.m. ET, confirming that the outage had been resolved and that Verizon would contact affected customers directly to issue account credits. While this doesn’t necessarily make up for a full day of network downtime, at least Verizon users can reconnect and make calls when not connected to wifi.

But some customers have not returned to normal. In fact, they still see the same “SOS” alert on their phone as yesterday. For these users, the outage is still ongoing, as they cannot access the Internet or communicate with others without going through satellite connectivity or finding a wifi connection. When you need to be on the move, especially on the road, this is not an option.

How to get your Verizon phone out of SOS mode

Luckily, there’s a simple solution here, which Verizon shared in its troubleshooting article: restart your phone. It doesn’t matter if you already restarted your phone yesterday during the outage: to see the results, you’ll need to turn your phone off and on again. After Verizon has implemented its fix.

Different smartphones have different restart methods, but here are some tips for the most popular models:

• Restart an iPhone: Press and hold one of the volume buttons with the side button (power), until you see the power off slider. Slide to turn off, then wait until the screen goes completely black. After about 30 seconds, you can press and hold the side button to turn it back on. Note: If your iPhone has a Home button, you can simply press and hold the Side button to bring up the power off slider.

• Restart a Samsung Galaxy: Press and hold the Volume Down button and the Side button until the Power options appear. Here choose “Restart” and then tap “Restart” again.

• Restart a pixel: If you have a Pixel 6 or newer, hold down the Volume Up button and the Side button for a few seconds, then tap “Restart” when it appears. If you have a Pixel 5 or earlier, simply hold the side button until the phone restarts.

If your phone model is not listed here, you can search the Internet for specific instructions on how to restart it. However, typically the process involves holding down both the side button and one of the volume buttons.