What to Know About the Verizon Outage—and the Credit the Company Is Offering Users

A widespread outage that impacted cellular data and voice services for hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers across the U.S. on Wednesday was resolved after over 10 hours.

Users began reporting outages mid-day on Wednesday. Some said that their phones showed that they had no service or were in “SOS” mode.

“We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly,” the nation’s largest wireless carrier posted on X around 1 p.m. ET. “We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience.”

The company later announced that the outage had been resolved around 10:30 p.m. and encouraged users still experiencing issues to restart their devices. Verizon also offered to provide account credits to those who were affected. 

A spokesperson for the company told TIME in a statement that the outage was connected to a "software issue" and it is "conducting a full review of what happened."

Here's what we know.

How many users experienced outages, and where?

The full scale of the issue is not entirely clear, but reports of disruptions were numerous and spread over large distances.

Downdetector said around 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday that it had received more than 1.5 million reports since the outage began.

Reports flooding in around noon, according to the tracking website. A majority of the issues were reported to be related to mobile phone connectivity, at 61%, followed by users having no signal, at 35%, and mobile internet disruptions, at 4%.

The locations experiencing outages were scattered around much of the country, with Downdetector showing the most reports coming from New York City, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, Dallas, and Ashburn.

New York City showed a peak of over 10,000 reported outages just after 1:00 p.m. The city’s Office of Emergency Management said it was "working closely with our partners" and was aware of the outage, but did not name Verizon directly.

In Washington, D.C., the city’s official emergency notification system, AlertDC, sent a message to residents informing them of the “nationwide” Verizon outage.

The alert noted that the outage “may be affecting some users to connect with 911.”

How big are the account credits Verizon is offering impacted customers, and how can users redeem them?

Verizon is offering $20 account credits to users who were impacted by the outage, an amount the company said covers “multiple days of service” on average.

The credits can be redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app, according to Verizon. Users can expect to receive texts from Verizon when their credits are available. The company said business customers would be contacted directly regarding their allotted credits. 

“Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves,” Verizon said in its post announcing the details of the credits Thursday morning, nearly 24 hours after the outage began. “This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.”

Were other cell phone carriers impacted?

Some disruptions were also reported for other carriers on Wednesday, including AT&T and TMobile.

Those reports were far fewer in number than those for Verizon, however, and both companies said that their networks were “operating normally.”

“However, due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time," a spokesperson for T-Mobile told media outlets in a statement.