Verizon is preparing to offer an olive branch to its customers after an outage took its cellular service offline for nearly ten hours. Here's how to get it.
On Wednesday, around 12:30 PM ET, Verizon faced an outage that impacted hundreds of thousands of customers. Customers reported no service, with iPhone owners reporting an "SOS" where their network icon should have been.
While users could still make calls and send texts via Wi-Fi, those away from an access point were left without service for up to ten hours.
In an effort to make it up to their customers, Verizon is offering affected users a $20 account credit. Users will receive a text with instructions when it comes time to claim the credit.
Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app. You will receive a text message
— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) January 15, 2026
Verizon says the $20 credit applies at the account level, not per line. That means one-line and multi-line accounts receive the same $20 total credit.
Verizon reported the outage as resolved at 10:20 PM ET. The cause is still not publicly known.
