Prepaid Verizon users find service interrupted

ROCHESTER - Some Verizon phone customers were without service today after a major glitch developed last night around midnight, according to a local Verizon store manager.

Dave Wilson, who runs the Verizon store in Rochester, said it appears to be a problem on the "back end" that is affecting customers with prepaid phones.

"It doesn’t appear to be a tower, if it were a tower everyone would be affected," Wilson said.

He said many customers had stopped by his store located across from the Rochester Walmart to complain about a loss of service.

He said that Verizon officials are putting the temporary loss of service on a very high degree of urgency and he expects the outage will be fixed soon.

He said phone, text and data are nonfunctioning in the prepaid phones that are affected.

Wilson was not sure if all prepaid phones were affected, but said no contract customers appeared to be having problems, adding that the phones used by Verizon employees at his store were all functioning properly.

He also wasn't sure whether it was a regional or national outage.

Calls made to Verizon using the *611 number to find out what the problem was and when it would be resolved were immediately terminated, telling customers they could not be helped at this time and to call back later.

"In the years I’ve been here I’ve never seen anything like it," Wilson said.