We've received a brief statement from Verizon this morning regarding the LTE outage it suffered yesterday afternoon:

4G LTE issue resolved overnight. 3G operated normally; calling, texting were unaffected.

As the company notes, 3G data service was totally unaffected — the problem is that LTE-enabled phones weren't automatically falling back to 3G, it seems, which means you needed to manually disable LTE to get any data service at all.

Considering the scope and severity of these continued incidents — which have been affecting most or all Verizon LTE markets nationwide, and have occasionally struck since early 2011 — we'd love to see the company put together a more cohesive statement around what's going wrong and how it plans to prevent it from happening again. Even if you dare to make the argument that customers don't need such an explanation, certainly shareholders do.

Update: We reached back out to Verizon over comments that 3G did seem to experience some outages, and were simply told again that "the 3G network operated normally." It appears the company isn't interested in commenting further at this time.