So yeah… if your phone randomly went into SOS mode and you stared at it like it personally betrayed you, welcome to the Verizon outage. Late morning, service just disappeared for a ton of users nationwide. No calls. No texts. No data. Just you, your thoughts, and maybe Wi-Fi if you were lucky.

At first it felt like a “restart your phone and pray” situation, but it didn’t take long to realize this was big. People everywhere were down at the same time. Navigation apps were useless, messages wouldn’t send, and doing literally anything on the go suddenly felt impossible.

The scary part? Some folks had trouble reaching emergency services. That’s when it went from annoying to serious. Verizon acknowledged the issue and said engineers were on it, but details were pretty thin while it was happening.

Of course, the internet coped the only way it knows how — memes. Brands jumped in, jokes flew, and Krispy Kreme handing out free donuts somehow became the emotional support hero of the day.