If you are a Verizon cell phone customer, you may have noticed something strange with your phone yesterday.

At least 100,000 Verizon were struggling with outages in their cell phone service, and this number may have been much bigger. Before I left work yesterday, I stuck my head into my boss's office to say goodbye and I'll see him tomorrow, and he mentioned his phone did not have any service.

1 minute later, when I got to my car to head home, I got a phone call from my dad he was wondering if his phone was working because he was also having phone issues. One of these people lives in eastern Iowa and the other lives in Minneapolis.... so at first, I thought it might've just been a strange coincidence but it turns out it was a problem across the country.

Verizon Outages

According to CBS, as of 9:11 a.m. CT, more than 100,000 outages were logged with DownDetector, which is a website that is used to track service outages for cell phone companies, websites, and other businesses. The outages experienced by Verizon customers were felt across the entire country from Iowa to Minnesota, and Los Angeles to New York.

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The East Coast appears to have been the most affected but outages were reported in the Des Moines area and multiple locations in eastern Iowa as well. Verizon users who experienced this outage might have noticed their phone saying SOS where they would normally see their service bars.

What Is SOS Mode On Your Phone?

When your phone automatically switches to SOS, it doesn't mean really "save our ship," even though it may feel like you need help with your phone. What your phone is doing is telling you that it is having trouble connecting to any wireless network.

What's important to remember is that even if your phone does switch to SOS, you can still call 911 and you can most likely still use Wi-Fi calling. Once you are disconnected from Wi-Fi, you will have trouble calling family, friends, or work.

CBS also reports that this service issue affected both iPhone and Android users.

Will Verizon Users Be Compensated?

Some Verizon users experienced this outage for upwards of 9 hours and were unable to fully use their phone for longer than an average work day. Cell phones aren't cheap and depending on the plan you or your family has, they can cost close to $100 per month to use. When paying that amount of money, you expect the product to work as advertised.

Social media was flooded with individuals wanting some type of credit on their next phone bill while others claimed they were cancelling their service completely.

Back in February, AT&T users experienced a similar outage and customers were given a small $5 credit on their next phone bill. That might not be the case for Verizon users. According to KTLA, Verizon's website says they do not offer credits for network outages.

It appears that we likely won't find out a reason for the outage and cell phone providers aren't very open as to what causes outages. Verizon has not said what caused the outage and as of today (Oct 1), we don't know what caused this issue.