House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Andrew R. Garbarino has sent letters to Verizon and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requesting briefings after a recent nationwide outage disrupted phone and text services for several hours.
The incident left many Verizon customers unable to make calls or send texts, affecting both individuals and government agencies. More than 40,000 public safety agencies depend on Verizon’s network for communication.
In his letter, Chairman Garbarino raised concerns about the reliability of Verizon’s network and its impact on critical services. He stated, “Verizon is the largest mobile network in the United States, and this outage affected tens of thousands of customers, including components of the federal government, with more than 2.3 million outage reports. The scale and duration of the outage raises serious concerns and questions regarding the strength and security of the Verizon network. These concerns include reliability for emergency services and impact on both state and federal government operations. As of today, Verizon has yet to provide a public explanation regarding the cause of the outage.”
The chairman has asked both organizations to provide additional information about what caused the disruption and what steps are being taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.
