Verizon is quickly working to make amends with people who were affected by the wireless data and voice service outage across the U.S. on Wednesday. The company announced that it will give eligible customers a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
“Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give them a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app to accept,” Verizon said in a statement on Thursday. “On average, this covers multiple days of service.”
Customers will receive a text message when their credit is available in the app. Business customers can expect to be contacted directly.
“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can,” the statement added. “But it’s a way of acknowledging our customers’ time and showing that this matters to us.”
A Verizon spokesperson told multiple news outlets, including USA Today, the New York Post, and NPR that the outage was caused by a “software issue,” and that the company was investigating the matter further.
Verizon confirmed the outage at around 1:07 p.m. EST on social media, and then said at around 10:20 p.m. that the outage had been fixed. At its peak, outage reporting website Downdetector got 319,134 reports from people indicating that Verizon was having issues. In total, Downdetector received over 2.3 million reports about the Verizon outage.
Sources in law enforcement told ABC News that they believe the incident was not caused by a cyberattack but rather by a server failure in New Jersey. In addition, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told Reuters that the agency would also look into the incident and “take appropriate action.”
Some Americans are worried that the outage is indicative of a bigger issue for the country. “We’ve been seeing more of these massive outages. AWS, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Google,” a Reddit user wrote in the Computer System Administration forum. “The more dependency on a short list of major infrastructure organizations, the more centralized we become, the worse off we are.”
Verizon said that customers still experiencing issues should restart their devices to reconnect to the network. “We are sorry for what you experienced and will continue to work hard day and night to provide the outstanding network and service that people expect,” they added.
