Joseph Maldonado/CNET
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 My Verizon 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," a Verizon spokesperson said 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 due to a technical problem rather than a hack.
"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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