Verizon Apologizes to Customers and Offers $20 Credit Following Outage
A Verizon representative apologized to subscribers Thursday after an outage cut service to tens of thousands of its wireless customers across the country Wednesday (see 2601140050). It's also offering a $20 credit to customers who lost service. In an email Wednesday night, a spokesperson said the outage had been resolved and customers still having problems should restart their devices to reconnect to the network.
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"Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves," a spokesperson emailed Thursday. The $20 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.”
Verizon has been under new management since October, when Dan Schulman, a Verizon board member and the former CEO of PayPal, took over from former CEO Hans Vestberg (see 2510060045).
Dexter McCoy, a county commissioner in Fort Bend County, Texas, called for an investigation of the outage in a letter to the FCC posted Thursday. (He addressed the letter to former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.) “Reliable telecommunications are not a luxury,” McCoy said. During the outage, “countless Verizon customers have reported seeing ‘SOS’ messages in place of normal cellular service, indicating they were unable to use voice or data, a situation that is understandably causing frustration, confusion, and concern.”