Verizon's outage compensation is only making users angrier
If you were furious with Big Red for not being able to use your phone yesterday, get ready for more disappointment.
To make amends (at least to some degree) for one of the biggest US wireless network outages in a long time, the nation's top carrier is ready to offer an account credit to anyone... willing to go through the effort of manually claiming the reward. That and the value of said gift is causing outrage across social media, although some Verizon subscribers are focusing on the positives.
How much are you getting, when, and how?
Unfortunately, I can give you a 100 percent clear and certain answer to only one of those three questions. That's because Verizon has confirmed on its official Twitter X account earlier today that you "will" be granted a $20 credit that can be "easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app" without actually specifying when that operation will begin.
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.
Verizon News on X, January 15
Seeing as how this is clearly a time-sensitive affair due to all the negative media attention received by Big Red over the past 24 hours or so and especially the immense frustration of millions of customers across the country, I'd expect the account credits to start being issued in a matter of hours. One or two days, tops.
But of course, that's just an assumption on my part, so please, don't come after me if Verizon doesn't send you a text by the end of the week. That's right, you will be notified as soon as the credit is available, at which point you'll have to access the myVerizon app and... hope to find the deal there.
While that sounds like a fairly straightforward redemption process, a lot of X users and Redditors are wondering why they need to open an app and do... something there to claim the $20 credit in the first place. Surely, Verizon could have automatically applied the offer to all of its customer accounts without taking any of their time, which leads some to believe that not everyone will actually qualify for this outage compensation.
Should you be happy or angry with Big Red?
As far as the outage itself is concerned, things are as clear as day and there's absolutely no room for debate. Such situations simply should not happen, and when they do, they definitely should not impact millions and millions of users and take hours and hours to be mitigated.
The $20 compensation, meanwhile, is stirring quite the dispute on X and Reddit, with the vast majority of commenters claiming that that doesn't cover their trouble and grief, but also a few people pointing out that 20 bucks is more than... nothing, which is what major US carriers have offered a number of times in the past in similar instances.
Verizon's overpriced network completely died on me. No GPS...couldn't get to jobs. No emails, no texts, couldn't even call 911. Had to cancel on multiple customers and lost way more than $20 that day. Their pathetic $20 credit is an insult. Gross negligence and total breach of service. Furious. Avoid Verizon.
Free_Tart_7487 on Reddit, January 15
Another detail that's causing even more frustration is that Verizon is calling its outage compensation an "account credit", which strongly suggests everyone... that will qualify for the offer will receive the same credit regardless of the number of lines on an account.
That's considered unfair by quite a few Redditors who are rightfully highlighting that the owner of an account with five or six lines is likely to have suffered much more (emotional and financial) harm than a single-line user during Wednesday's outage, but again, Verizon could have given nothing to no one, leaving you waiting for the inevitable class action lawsuit to (hopefully) settle the matter.
How can all of this be avoided in the future?
Now that, my friends, is the million-dollar question, and mind you, I'm not even talking about the outage itself because, well, I'm no cybersecurity expert and the origin of yesterday's debacle remains a mystery.
This is 20 dollars PER ACCOUNT not line. This is insulting and unacceptable. Imagine having 10 lines theyre giving 2 dollars per affected customer? This is going to cost Verizon WAY more than 20 dollars per account when all those accounts go to T-Mobile.
jmb11111 on Reddit, January 15
Strictly as far as these types of "rewards" are concerned, I believe that carriers should instate clear and transparent rules to make sure every user is correctly and easily compensated for lost service. Both the value and the redemption process should be made universal policy (especially by carriers who tend to go through outages far more frequently than anyone would desire) to avoid both controversy and unnecessary additional grief or uncertainty for already-exasperated customers.
Will that ever become a reality? Probably not, but if Verizon can come up with some silly new tax or fee every couple of years or so, a standard outage reward surely wouldn't take an unimaginable effort on the mobile network operator's part.
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