A strange cell phone day.

Mid-morning yesterday (8/30/2025), my wife's phone just stopped connecting to the cellular network (Verizon, in our case).

The phone said SOS at the top instead of its normal display of a signal strength bar graph.

We tried powering the phone down and back up, several times. Didn't fix the problem.

Everything else about the phone seemed to be fine. It was able to get on WiFi with no problems. Its GPS seemed to be working fine, etc. But she couldn't make or receive a call, couldn't get on the internet without wifi, couldn't send or receive text messages. All those Verizon things were just not working.

My phone is on the same plan as hers, and my number is only one digit removed from hers. My phone was just fine.

We happened to be out on the road at the time, and so we went to the local Apple Store and a friendly tech ran a diagnostics program on the phone and it all came back green.

He said there was some chatter among the other staff in the store that there might be a widespread Verizon problem, and maybe we could go over to the Verizon store a little ways down the road.

We called Verizon and the AI that answered told us that there were no outages in our area, and then told us it would be 37 minutes before a human would talk to us, and then said "System Error" and hung up.

I looked on DownDetector and it had a chart saying that there might be a Verizon problem. But there were only 21,000 reports across the entire country, didn't seem likely. I looked on Reddit and some people in Florida were complaining about some problem that might have been similar. Or maybe not. The Verizon status pages continued to report no problems anywhere.

We went on with our day.

Her phone stayed on SOS; my phone remained fine. It was a pleasant summer day and we didn't do much more about it.

Late in the afternoon, after we got home, my wife decided to plug her phone into the charger, as the phone was down to 35% charge.

The instant she plugged it in, it instantly went online and has been fine ever since.

I don't have a good mental model for why that worked.

My best theory is that there is some software in the phone that says: when you are plugged in, check for updates. And something about that update check managed to get the phone back online in a way that simply rebooting it didn't.

Everything is so complicated and mysterious these days; my ability to diagnose even simple problems seems faulty.

But the phone is working again.