Verizon says nationwide outage was resolved; affected customers offered $20 credit

Verizon says its nationwide wireless outage that disrupted service for customers across the United States has been resolved, and the carrier is offering a $20 account credit to affected users. The incident knocked out or degraded voice, text messaging and mobile data for many customers, with some devices showing “SOS” or “SOS only,” a status that generally indicates a loss of carrier connectivity while still enabling emergency calling in certain scenarios.

In an update posted by Verizon, the company said service was restored late on January 14, 2026, and advised customers who were still seeing issues to restart their devices to reconnect. Verizon also said it would provide credits for impacted customers and later detailed that the $20 credit could be redeemed through the myVerizon app, with business customers contacted separately about credits.

The carrier acknowledged that the outage fell short of its standards, and positioned the credit as a way to recognize customers’ time and frustration. While such credits cannot fully compensate users who rely on mobile connectivity for work, healthcare coordination, travel, or family emergencies, they are a common industry response when outages are widespread and highly visible.

Beyond the immediate inconvenience, large mobile outages raise questions about resilience, redundancy and transparency in critical communications infrastructure. Cellular networks now underpin not only personal communications but also authentication for banking and enterprise systems, ride-sharing and delivery services, emergency notifications, and elements of public safety coordination.

For consumers, the practical guidance after a network incident typically includes restarting the phone, toggling airplane mode, confirming carrier settings updates, and checking carrier advisories for region-specific restoration notes. In Verizon’s notice, the company emphasized restarting devices as the primary step for customers still experiencing problems after the restoration announcement.

For customers who were affected and want the offered compensation, Verizon said the credit would be available through the myVerizon app once provisioned to the account, with a text message sent when it is ready to redeem. Credits of this sort generally apply to account balances rather than being paid out in cash, and eligibility can depend on account status and whether the line was in an impacted area during the disruption.

Verizon has not, in its public outage update, provided a detailed technical explanation of what triggered the service disruption. But its public statements indicate the company’s engineering teams worked to restore service through the day and into the evening, and it encouraged customers to take the simple reconnection step of restarting devices if lingering issues remain.