Did Your Verizon Service Get Interrupted? Here’s How To Claim a Credit for the Outage
Verizon customers were stuck on "SOS" for almost a full day.
Updated Jan. 15 2026, 2:41 p.m. ET
On Jan. 14, 2026, Verizon customers were left saying, "Can you hear me now?" for a whole new reason. The company's iconic slogan took on a new meaning when an estimated 1.5 million customers lost service for half of the day.
Customers across the country were impacted by the loss of service, with many of them finding themselves stuck in SOS mode for the duration of the day. As you can imagine, this upset many customers since cell phones have become a part of our day-to-day lives.
And it wasn't just texting and phone services that were impacted, either. The outage took some users completely offline, temporarily cutting them off from things like banking apps, social media services, driving directions, and in some cases, the apps they use to check their children out of school at the end of the day.
As such, Verizon executives have promised to make it up to customers by offering them a statement credit. Keep reading to find out how to get your credit for the Verizon outage.
How can you get the $20 Verizon credit?
A Verizon spokesperson gave a statement to Fortune magazine a day after the incident. “Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves,” they told the company before sharing that they planned to make it up to Verizon Wireless users with a $20 credit through the company's MyVerizon app, telling the magazine that “on average, this covers multiple days of service.”
Business users will be instructed on how to collect credits separately.
However, the spokesperson noted that the $20 wouldn't fully make up for the stress and inconvenience some people went through. That's likely because in this day and age, our cell phones really are an extension of us. And, for better or for worse, just about everyone uses them in some capacity throughout the day, often to complete essential tasks.
For their part, customers seem eager to log on and collect the credit, even if it doesn't make up for the emotional damage those 10 hours caused.
Why did Verizon customers experience an outage?
After spending 10 hours in the technological dark, many Verizon Wireless customers are eager to learn why their service was interrupted, and if Verizon has a plan to ensure it doesn't happen again.
However, if the company knows why more than a million users were pushed into SOS mode on the 14th, the company was keeping it to themselves in the hours after service was fully restored. In a series of statements posted on X, the company's account simply stated that engineers were working on things.
According to NBC News, Verizon hadn't elaborated on what those things were, or how they could've caused the blackout. A New York State Assembly member responded to the cell phone issues by sending a letter to Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), asking the agency to investigate what happened, noting that the service interruption created a danger to public safety, raising questions about the country's broader communications infrastructure.