The nation's largest wireless provider, Verizon, has been down for hours in some markets (UPDATE)

UPDATE (2): Verizon customers continue to have problems in certain markets and the number of complaints submitted to DownDetector has surpassed the peak from earlier in the day. A new city, Baltimore, Maryland, has been added to the locations with the most complaints. If you're having issues with your Verizon service, drop us a line in the comments section and don't forget to add your location. As of 1:18 am EDT, there were 2,761 complaints about Verizon sent to DownDetector.

UPDATE: Even though the number of complaints against Verizon submitted to DownDetector has dropped sharply,a tweet just sent by Verizon support indicates that service remains down in the same markets. A Verizon customer named Jennifer wrote, "How long are our phones going to be down? Seems to be many of us in Paducah KY without service."

Verizon responded, "Hi, Jennifer! I do not have an ETA as of right now, but I want to assure you, our technicians are working as quickly as possible to restore service in your area. We apologize for this inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience." So for now, the outage continues.

The original story follows...

Some Verizon subscribers are having issues with the nation's largest wireless carrier today. According to DownDetector, the number of complaints it received about Verizon soared from 244 at 2:38 pm EDT (which was still well above baseline) to peak at 2,503 at 3:23 pm EDT. As of 7:08 pm EDT, there were still 1,408 complaints coming in which is 10 times more than baseline.

56% complained that the problems experienced by Verizon were causing them issues with their mobile phones. 24% said that they could not get connected to any signals from Verizon, and 19% stated that they had a total blackout of Verizon service.

The areas with the most complaints include Evansville, Indiana; Paducah, Kentucky; Owensboro, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; New York City, New York; Murray, Kentucky; Jasper, Indiana; Newburgh, Indiana; and Benton, Arkansas. As you can see, New York City is the oddball here in terms of location and the issue Verizon is happening in the Big Apple might be different than the problems being experienced in Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas.

Verizon sent out a tweet not too long ago in which it blamed the problem on a cut fiber. The company tweeted, "Fiber cuts in the Evansville area are causing a disruption in service for customers in and around the area. Our engineers are working with our third-party fiber provider to get those cuts fixed and service restored. We still do not have an estimated time."

However, on DownDetector a Verizon customer wrote, "Just spoke with someone from Verizon and they told me that a storm in Evansville has taken out a tower that feeds a large portion of signal to most of western Kentucky southern Indiana and parts of western Tennessee. They said the storm has also affected other carriers as well."

Despite the obvious problems that Verizon is having, some are being told by Verizon phone reps that there are no outages even though some of these customers complaining do not have any cellular service on their phone and only have the SOS icon on their handset's status bar.

In response to another customer who sent them a tweet stating that service is out in their area, Verizon wrote back, "Hello and thanks for your mention. We read that service is out, and we're here to help find out why and how to get your service back up and running."

This could be a long night for some Verizon customers. We will continue to monitor the situation and will update the story when warranted.