Verizon provides $20 credits after outage knocks out cellphone service in Arizona and beyond

PHOENIX – Verizon is providing credits to cellphone customers in Arizona and other places who were impacted by Wednesday’s widespread outage.

“Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves,” a spokesperson for the telecom giant said in a statement Thursday morning. “To help provide some relief to those affected, we are giving customers a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app to accept. On average, this covers multiple days of service. Our business customers will be contacted directly about their credits.”

Outage-tracking website Downdetector showed a surge of complaints about Verizon service in Phoenix starting around 10 a.m. Wednesday.

“No service since 9am in Phoenix – missing important phone calls – expect a discount from Verizon. No communication at all – is this what $160 a month gets you,” wrote one Downdetector visitor.

The number of complaints was significantly lower by 2 p.m. but continued throughout the day at a slower rate.

Verizon acknowledged it was experiencing technical difficulties in a statement Wednesday.

“We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers,” the statement said. “Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience.”

The outage was resolved as of 8:30 p.m. The company encouraged customers still having issues to restart their device in order to reconnect to the network.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on Jan. 14, 2026.

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