Verizon said it would "work through the night until service is restored" and said it would provide "account credits" for any customer who lost service.

Verizon says a software problem caused the glitch and it is conducting a postmortem, but experts say outages are "a fact of life" these days.

Verizon says it's working to restore service. But if your Verizon device still shows "SOS" instead of service bars, you're affected by today's outage.

Nearly 200,000 users reported their service being disrupted on Wednesday, according to Downdetector, with reports flooding in around noon. A majority of the issues were reported to be related to mobile phone connectivity, at 61%, followed by users having no signal, at 35%, and mobile internet disruptions, at 4%.

Tess Coward, a 27-year-old PR professional based in New York City, woke up feeling under the weather on Wednesday. But without the ability to make phone calls or receive text messages, she couldn’t get in touch with her doctor or log into the provider’s patient portal.

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.

Verizon Communications has received the final approvals needed to buy fiber-optic broadband provider Frontier Communications after agreeing to some concessions to California regulators, including a small-business spending commitment.

Millions of Verizon Wireless customers across the country were hit with a massive service outage on Wednesday that left many wireless customers unable to call, text, or access the Internet for much of the day.