Law enforcement in central California affected by the Verzion outage

Fresno, California (KFSN) – A major outage in cellular service affected most Verizon Wireless customers Wednesday afternoon.

The outage affected customers from Seattle to San Diego and east, Las Vegas, Denver and even New York City.

Most police departments and sheriffs in Central California have been affected in some way.

For Clovis police, that meant officers and dispatchers couldn’t call each other on their cell phones, but people could still call 911.

“Fortunately, we still have a radio system that we can still communicate with,” says Ty Wood of Clovis Police. “It takes some getting used to because we are so used to having our cell phones in our hands or pockets readily available.”

In Madeira and Mariposa counties, people who needed emergency service were limited to texting 911.

Fresno and Clovis police’s non-emergency lines can only be reached by calling from a land line, but officers say that hasn’t stopped them from doing their job.

“A lot of us lived and worked in the era before cell phones,” Wood said. “Just like our computer system is down, we have a backup system for that – we’re still ready to serve.”

Verizon said Monday night that its engineers were able to identify and fix the problem and cellular service has been restored to affected areas.

Throughout the day, most people online said they were able to send text messages without making any phone calls.

Verizon says that any customer who is still experiencing issues should restart their phone.