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

Verizon said the company plans to “make it right” with millions of customers, including many in New Jersey, 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 only.”

The company said in a statement that customers affected in the outage will get a credit on their bills. “Details will be shared directly with customers,” Verizon said. “We sincerely apologize for the disruption.”

Verizon 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 noon on Wednesday.

Reports appeared to peak at more than 175,000 by 12:30 p.m. — but still remained elevated later into the afternoon, sitting at nearly 57,000 as of 3:30 p.m.

New Jersey was one of multiple areas where significant outages were reported, as well as New York City, Philadelphia, Miami and Atlanta.

• Previous Coverage: Major Verizon Outage Resolved In NJ

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.”