According to Downdetector, a site that tracks service outages, reports of outages at Verizon spiked around midday Eastern time. The number of people reporting outages in the past 24 hours peaked at close to 180,000 before falling through the afternoon. The last reading just after 4 p.m. was below 55,500.

New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan called on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the hourslong service outage.

The scale proved unprecedented. Reports on Down Detector hit an initial peak of 115,000 before surging to over 180,000, representing hundreds of thousands more unreported cases. The disruption affected users from South Florida to Albany, New York, as far west as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and later expanded to include Texas and Missouri.

During the outage, iPhone and Android users reported seeing SOS or "SOS only" in the status bar. This means the device isn't connected to a network, but the phone users can still make emergency calls. The information for this story was provided by DownDetector, Verizon. This story was reported from Los Angeles.