If you wondered what it might be like to be in the middle of a blackout during an impending apocalypse, look no further than the events of Jan. 14. At least 1.5 million Verizon customers − including myself − were without service, some for up to 10 hours.

While a phone service outage is most definitely a first-world problem, it was strangely inconvenient and worrisome ‒ especially as a mom ‒ and made me think I'm way too dependent on my smartphone for, well, everything.

As of this writing, Verizon has given very little explanation as to what might have caused the interruption of service, except to say the outage was tied to a software issue, according to a Verizon spokesperson who spoke to USA TODAY. Verizon is conducting a review to see what went wrong.

"Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry,"........

© USA TODAY