Verizon Outage strikes nationwide

"I haven't had Net or email access all morning (4:30 am EST when I woke up). How mournful that this could happen," a user in Cincinnati wrote today on a Droid forum. "How pathetic that Verizon doesn't post something up on their site." Judging by the message boards, the Midwest and South seem to have been hit harder by the outages than the coasts. "Mine started going haywire last night," an Los angeles Droid fan posted this morning.

Hundreds of consumers are flocking to online discussion boards to document a Verizon outage across the carrier's network, a problem that Verizon says it is working to fix. Outage time appears to vary, but some Verizon users say they have been unable to access the Web or email for hours. Crucially, the issues center on faulty Net and information connections – Verizon phone service appears to be unaffected.

Tim Stevens at Engadget confirms that Verizon is aware of the outages, although the company has not said how soon the issues could be resolved. "We'd advise not calling and bothering the support folks about this – based on how long they were on hold we are guessing they have their hands full at the moment," Stevens counselled. Lots of forum participants seem to agree, although that has not stopped others from flooding switchboards with complaints.

The outage comes at a time when Verizon is jostling with AT&T for shares of the US market. AT&T, of coursework, has outage problems of its own: Heavy traffic from iPhone users has bogged down the AT&T information network. Meanwhile, there's widespread concerns that the forthcoming Apple iPad, which will utilize a 3G connection, could bring AT&T information speeds to a screeching halt.

Another take on this story: Keeping modern, networked systems up and walking is hard. As features grow, so does complexity. look at the Sony PlayStation Network problem that crippled PS3s Sunday night. A simple clock bug temporarily turned lots of consoles in to fancy bricks.