Earlier this week, your phone might have been borderline unusable—at least, when you were away from wifi. That was due to Verizon’s nationwide outage, which affected roughly two million customers across the United States. If you were among them, you couldn’t use your phone on the go, which is sort of the idea behind cellphones in general. This included the ability to use navigation apps in your car, send work emails or messages, or make calls outside of SOS mode, which basically limited you to emergency services. Worse, some users are still experiencing issues this morning following Verizon’s official resolution, though there’s likely a quick fix for that.
I don’t have Verizon, but if I did, I’d be a bit ticked off. Outages happen, but this one was massive, and the company still hasn’t offered much of an explanation for what actually happened. In spite of this (or perhaps because of it), the company seems keen to smooth the whole thing over. When Verizon announced it had resolved the outage, it also said it would reach out to affected customers directly to issue account credits. It’s a pain to deal with interruptions to services as important as your wireless network, but at least Verizon wants to compensate you for the problem, right? Just don’t expect much.
Verizon’s account credits might seem a bit low
Verizon made a post on X, once again apologizing for the outage and revealing what each affected account can expect to receive as compensation: $20.
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Verizon says this number represents “multiple days of service” on average, and that no credit can make up for what happened. That might be true, but in my humble opinion, a larger credit could perhaps get a bit closer. Maybe this is greater than the on-paper dollar value of losing a day of service, but it’s not like customers think of their bills as paying for their usage. They pay Verizon quite a bit, expecting that their smartphones to be connected at all times within Verizon’s coverage map. Considering the upheaval a day of disconnection no doubt caused, I’m not sure $20 is going to cut it.
What do you think so far?
But I digress: $20 is the number, and $20 is what affected customers can expect to receive. If you’re among them, Verizon says they will text you when the credit is available. When it is, you can log into the myVerizon app to claim your recompense.
