[in0v8r]

The alternative network reports are most likely people trying to call Verizon customers and reporting an outage when they can't get through.

[eob]

You think like a person who’s debugged large systems failures before :). That feels very plausible.

[madcaptenor]

I've seen it happen before - in the big AT&T outage a couple years ago reports came in on downdetector of outages for other providers.