Verizon customers are now receiving alerts explaining how to claim a $20 credit issued by the wireless carrier following the hours-long Wednesday outage that reportedly affected more than 2 million customers, rendering them unable to use their devices.
The alerts are arriving as text messages to account holders as well as a notification from the myVerizon app. Customers will need to opt in to receive the $20, which is being issued per account.
“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But it’s a way of acknowledging our customers’ time and showing that this matters to us,” said a Verizon spokesperson in a statement Thursday.
While a cause is not fully known, a Verizon spokesperson told CNET’s sibling site Mashable that the outage is under investigation but appears to be a technical problem.
“This was a software issue and we are conducting a full review of what happened. As of now, there is no indication that this was a cyber security issue,” Verizon said in the statement.
If your phone is still having issues connecting to the network, Verizon suggests restarting your device to see if that restores the signal.
The outage caused some phones to become stuck in SOS mode for several hours on Wednesday. Although the outage slowly began to resolve in the late afternoon, with some getting cellular service back, others said on Downdetector that their phone began briefly working again, but then went back into SOS mode. User reports on Downdetector, which is also a sibling site of CNET’s, peaked at just over 180,000.
“I heard that people are getting service back but can’t make any calls or do anything, that happened to me here in Tampa, came back for 3 minutes then immediately went back into SOS,” one commenter wrote.
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Approximately seven hours into the outage, a Verizon spokesperson sent an email to CNET apologizing and providing initial notice that credits would be on their way.
“Today, we let many of our customers down, and for that, we are truly sorry. They expect more from us,” the spokesperson said during the outage. “We are working non-stop and making progress. Our teams will continue to work through the night until service is restored for all impacted customers. We will make this right — for any customer affected, we will provide account credits and share updates soon.”
Other carriers, such as AT&T and T-Mobile, were quick to poke fun at their competitor while touting their own services. They each posted on X to note that if their customers’ calls aren’t going through, it’s not an issue on their end, but on Verizon’s.
Outages like this one, while rare, can make seemingly outdated tech like landlines appealing, even in the age of smartphones.
