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Verizon is down, with many users seeing 'SOS' – here's everything we know about this outage
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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SOS is what a phone displays when it can reach a cell tower, but cant find an valid account associated with its SIM card. Its so you can make emergency calls to things like 911 from any phone, regardless of whether you’ve paid a carrier for service or had your service cut off. Or the only cell tower you can reach has no connection to your carrier, but other carriers on that tower are available to make emergency calls.
Newer phones can do satellite emergency calls too.
If you can get it to connect. None of our phones could
Is that true for wifi calling too?
Maybe. Depends on what you are asking. If you havent signed up with a carrier, i dont think you can enable wifi calling. But if you have no cell tower connection and youve previously set up wifi calling, it looks like you can still make emergency calls:
“Emergency calls on your iPhone are routed through cellular service when available. In the event that cellular service isn’t available, and you have enabled Wi-Fi Calling, emergency calls may be made over Wi-Fi, and your device’s location information may be used for emergency calls to aid response efforts, regardless of whether you enable Location Services. Some carriers may use the address you registered with the carrier when signing up for Wi-Fi Calling as your location. When connected to Wi-Fi calling, your iPhone may not receive emergency alerts.”
https://support.apple.com/en-is/guide/iphone/iph78f4697ca/ios
not always, when I’m out in the middle of nowhere, I also see sos
By out in the middle of nowhere, you would have to not be able to connect to any carrier network at all. If you are a Verizon customer and can't get Verizon signal, but you can see an AT&T tower, you will connect to it to make 911 calls, or a T-Mobile tower, if that's the one you can see. It doesn't matter. Every carrier has to carry 911 calls for every other carrier.
Also iphones I think use satellite for SoS capability now if no cell
I know my Pixel 9 can too.
Oh nice I have the 8, didn't know the 9 had satellite
good point, hadn’t thought of that
So the glitch is in auth/access/accounting, like the intern just pushed to prod.
Copilot told him: "you are absolutely right!"
I thought this wasn't a legal requirement of US carriers, sharing their towers for emergencies. Maybe it's a state thing.
Google AI search says it’s a federal mandate in the US. I couldn’t find the related legislation though.
I managed to find it.