A portion of Verizon's network crumpled on Wednesday, with up to 175,000 customers seeing "SOS" in their phones' status bars instead of connection bars.

Verizon customers across the U.S. reported service outages on Wednesday, with many saying that their devices have been limited to SOS since about noon Eastern Time.

This follows Verizon customers across the US, including several Verge writers, finding that service was spotty or nonexistent starting at around noon ET on January 14th, with phones switching to SOS M...