The widespread outage that impacted over 1.5 million Verizon wireless customers continued late Wednesday evening with no resolution in sight, prompting several major cities to advise residents to use other carriers to call emergency services.

If your phone is suddenly displaying " SOS ," "no service," or " emergency calls only " and you're on Verizon's network, it's probably not your phone's fault, and you're certainly not alone.

The outage tracking website Downdetector showed 172,980 reports of outages around 12:30 p.m. ET.

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.

A widespread Verizon cell phone service outage affected customers across the United States.