Verizon Wireless outage in League City

Why, why, why isn't there an easy way to find out about these things in real time?!  I started dropping calls around noon today and it quickly morphed into a bricked phone and marathon technical service ticket during which firmware was upgraded, phone was reset from their end, etc. etc. 

Finally after an hour of jacking around, their customer service rep told me to go down to the League City Verizon store so that they could replace my SIM card because every other troubleshooting line of inquiry had been exhausted to no avail. 

So down to the store I go, only to be told that it's a system outage. 

I said, "I just spent an hour on the phone with Verizon, and they checked repeatedly and they found no system outages."

"They're wrong.  We reported it.  There's nothing wrong with your phone.  Everyone is impacted."

With all of today's technology, there has to be a way to let people know not to waste their time on useless black holes of troubleshooting effort.  I look at the Twitterverse and see lots of reports of Verizon outages right now, but most tweets are not pinned to any specific geography, so I don't know if they apply to our area or somewhere else.  There's also nothing on Verizon's own website.  And I don't know where else to look when I'm wondering how much of my own time I should be wasting on any given difficulty of this nature. 

Yeah, I bet they are, given that voice is not available. 

Tap to expand.  Somebody shoot me, duh. 

Call failed, call dropped, device does not make any difference in the outcome.  That's an iPhone at the top and a Windows phone on the bottom.  That top number is the League City Verizon store.