Verizon said some of its wireless services were down Wednesday, leaving many customers without access to voice and data services. Downdetector, a website that tracks user-submitted reports of outages among popular online services,

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

Thousands of cell phone users reported a service outage on Wednesday morning, and the issue appears to be affecting a wide array of providers.

In short, when you see SOS on your phone, it means you're not connected to a cellular network. "If you see SOS or 'SOS only' in the status bar, your device isn't connected to your cellular network, but you can still make emergency calls through other carrier networks," reads an Apple support page on the feature.

Hundreds of thousands of Verizon cell phone users are without service on Wednesday afternoon, the company said. As of 1 p.m. DownDetector.com had compiled 460,000 user-generated reports, indicating widespread failure of mobile voice and data services. Most of those affected appeared to be in the eastern half of the U.S.

If you're not a Verizon Wireless customer then congratulations: You're NOT one of the literal millions of people stuck without any cellphone service for the past four-plus hours. Verizon, one of the largest cellphone service providers in the country,

Verizon says it's working on a solution for the national service disruption many customers experienced on Jan. 14.

Verizon now has the freedom to pull a lever that will make it more difficult for customers to switch phone carriers.