Tens of thousands of Verizon wireless customers were without cell service Wednesday thanks to an outage affecting people in the Southland and across the nation.
According to the outage-tracking site Downdetector, nearly 200,000 people had reported outages as of midday, although the impact was likely far greater. The site identified the Los Angeles area as one of the regions showing a particularly high number of reported problems among users.
Cities such as New York, Chicago, Houston and Atlanta were also hard hit. The outage appeared to begin around 9 a.m., with many users seeing “SOS” on their cell phone screens in place of the usual bars showing the strength of the cell signal.
In a statement posted on social media, Verizon said its “engineering teams are continuing to address today’s service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.”
There was no immediate word on the cause of the outage or when it might be resolved.