Verizon Voice Service Outage Hits Thousands of Customers Saturday Afternoon

Verizon customers across the country lost voice service Saturday afternoon, with outage reports spiking hard right around 3:30 p.m. ET.

Downdetector, the site that tracks user-submitted outage reports, logged more than 13,000 complaints about Verizon at the peak, according to CNBC. The largest number of affected customers were located in major metropolitan areas, including New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

This wasn't just a Verizon problem in isolation. Hundreds of customers from other major wireless carriers, including AT&T and T-Mobile US, had calls that couldn't get through, according to Downdetector data cited by CNBC.

Verizon confirmed the issue but kept it vague. "Verizon is making progress on an issue impacting voice services for some wireless customers," the company told CNBC in a statement. The company did not provide a reason for the outage.

The company's advice to affected customers: restart your device. That's a standard troubleshooting step for network issues, but it also tells you Verizon either doesn't know the root cause yet or isn't saying.

Downdetector aggregates user reports and social media chatter rather than pulling data directly from carrier networks. The 13,000-plus figure reflects people who noticed a problem and went online to complain, not a verified count of every customer whose phone stopped working. The real number affected could be higher or lower.

For now the basic facts are: a voice service outage affecting mainly Verizon wireless customers started around 3:30 p.m. ET, hit major cities hardest, spilled over into cross-carrier call failures, and Verizon says it's working on it without explaining what happened or how many people got hit.

Verizon hasn't answered several key questions as of Saturday evening: what caused the outage, how many customers were actually affected beyond the self-reported Downdetector numbers, and whether service was fully restored or is still degraded for some users.