Mendocino County, CA--My local Verizon data was also down for at least 10 minutes, likely overloaded due to the sudden outage, and local FM radio had no updates

Mendocino County, CA--My local Verizon data was also down for at least 10 minutes, likely overloaded due to the sudden outage, and local FM radio had no updates, as they do during events like wildfires or fiber optic cuts. So for the second Comcast outage in a row, my first line of confirmation on the outage (as opposed to damaged house wiring or hardware or something) was ham radio. I turned on the HT, hit scan, and the first carrier found was a conversation about the outage, a couple cities north. That's always helpful just to get oriented. But funny because there ought to be a better information fallback now that internet service is so crucial. I couldn't even log into the Xfinity app on my phone. Also, for the first time, I realized that texts using Google messenger's enhanced chat features may not go through at all in this situation, as one would expect normal texts to do. This was worrying because...do I need to disable this feature every time I go hiking now, if I want my texts to send?