Verizon To Offer Credits After Major CA Outage: What To Know, How To Get It

Verizon said the company plans to “make it right” with millions of customers, including many in California, who were unable to use their phones for most of the day due to a massive outage on Wednesday.

The company acknowledged the inconvenience the outage caused to more than 1.5 million customers who were unable to make calls and send or receive text messages for about 10 hours on Wednesday. Their phones displayed “SOS" in the service indicator area.

The company said in a statement that impacted customers will receive a $20 credit.

The credit "can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app. You will receive a text message when the credit is available. On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits," Verizon said.

The outage has been resolved. If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network. For those affected, we will provide account credits. Details will be shared directly with customers. We sincerely apologize for the…
— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) January 15, 2026

The carrier didn’t say what caused the outage, but said there was no indication of a cyberattack.

According to Downdetector, a website that collects user-submitted reports of outages, Verizon customers began to report issues with their service around 9 a.m. PT on Wednesday.

Later that morning, Downdetector said it had received over a million reports of service interruptions from Verizon customers across the U.S.

The highest concentrations of reports were in New York City, Atlanta and other East Coast cities. On the West Coast, outages were reported in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Portland.

At 7:20 p.m. Wednesday, Verizon said the outage had been resolved.

• Previous Coverage: 'Catastrophic' Cell Service Outage Impacts Millions, CA Hit Hard

Verizon updated customers throughout the day as its engineers worked to correct the outage, which the internet monitoring company Cisco ThousandEyes told USA Today was “one of the most significant connectivity interruptions in recent memory.”

"Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry. They expect more from us," the company said in one message on X. “We will make this right.”

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr told Reuters after a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the agency will review the outage “and take appropriate action.”