Service starting to be restored, company says NBC Chicago [Video]

Verizon late Monday afternoon reported progress on resolving a “network issue” that spurred widespread outages across parts of the U.S., including in the Chicago area.

In a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, at 4:04 p.m., the wireless network provider said its engineers were “making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored.”

“We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today,” the company’s statement continued. “We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.”

The issue appeared to knock out cellphone service for tens of thousands of Verizon users. Data from outage tracker DownDetectorshows that reports topped 100,000 shortly after 10 a.m. CT — and while that number dropped significantly, nearly 48,000 were still facing issues closer to 3 p.m. CT. In the Chicago area, more than …