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

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

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.

Estonia was the first major NATO victim of such things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia

Made worse by the fact Estonia is a more networked society than, for example, the US.

The down detector site has Verizon outage reports two order of magnitude bigger, so it doesn't seem like a cyber attack to me.

https://downdetector.com/status/t-mobile/ ~ 1,600

https://downdetector.com/status/att/ ~ 1,500

https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/ ~ peaked at ~169k, dropped to 67k