Joseph Maldonado/CNET
Verizon is offering $20 in credits following the hours-long Wednesday outage that reportedly affected more than 2 million customers, rendering them unable to use their devices.
In a Thursday statement, a Verizon spokesperson said the credit can be redeemed in the myVerizon app to accept it.
"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," reads the statement. If one's phone is still having issues connecting to the network, the statement advises to restart the device to check if that brings signal back.
The outage caused phones to become stuck in SOS mode. Although the outage slowly began to resolve, with some users getting service back on their phones, others said on Downdetector that their phone began briefly working again, but then went back into SOS mode. User reports on Downdetector peaked at just over 180,000.
Verizon did not offer a cause for the disruption.
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"I heard that people are getting service back but can't make any calls or do anything, that happened to me to here in Tampa, came back for 3 minutes then immediately went back into SOS," one commenter wrote. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as CNET.)
Approximately seven hours into the outage, a Verizon spokesperson sent an email to CNET apologizing for the outage and promising that the company would give credits to customers who were affected. "Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry. They expect more from us," the spokesperson said. "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.
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