Verizon Is Slipping Customers 20 Bucks to Pay for Yesterday’s Outage

The nation’s largest mobile carrier is trying to smooth things over with a little bit of cash after a major service outage yesterday. 

Verizon announced Thursday that it is offering affected customers a $20 credit on their accounts following a nearly day-long outage that disrupted service across the country.

The company said customers eligible for the credit will receive a text message once it’s available and can redeem it by logging into the myVerizon app. Verizon added that business customers will be contacted directly about their credits.

The carrier said the credit is meant to provide some relief and, on average, will cover multiple days of service.

“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us,” Verizon wrote in a post on X on Thursday. “We are sorry for what you experienced and will continue to work hard day and night to provide the outstanding network and service that you expect from Verizon.” 

Verizon also recommended that customers who were still experiencing connection issues try restarting their devices.

The statement comes just a day after Verizon, which serves roughly 146 million wireless customers in the U.S., suffered a major outage.

The company first acknowledged the issue shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday, saying its engineers were “engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly.”

It wasn’t until after 10 p.m. ET that Verizon announced on X that the issue had been resolved.

Downdetector said it received more than 1.5 million reports from users across the country during the disruption.

Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo about the cause of the outage or how many customers were affected or eligible for the credit.

Still, the scale of the service disruption has drawn attention from government officials.

Republican New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan Jr. wrote a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brandon Carr calling for an investigation into the “ongoing and repeated service outages” affecting customers in his district.

“These outages have had a significant and unacceptable impact on public safety, including disruptions to reliable access to emergency communication and critical response systems,” Beephan wrote in the letter posted on X. “Residents reported prolonged loss of voice, text, and data service, creating serious concerns regarding their ability to contact 911, receive emergency alerts, and maintain dependable communication during urgent situations.”

Verizon has made headlines before for other service outages in 2024 and 2025.

Meanwhile, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez wrote Wednesday in her own post on X that she was closely monitoring the outage and would be asking the agency’s consumer and public safety bureaus to investigate its source.

And then this morning, the FCC X account posted that it is “continuing to actively investigate and monitor the situation to determine next steps.”

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.