Verizon says it'll credit customers $20 after its service outage lasted over 9 hours, but you have to claim it

• Over 170,000 Verizon customers reported a service outage on Wednesday.
• The outages lasted more than 9 hours.
• Verizon said it will provide affected customers with a $20 account credit.

Verizon is offering an account credit after a service outage affected tens of thousands of customers on Wednesday.

A Verizon spokesperson told Business Insider that it "did not meet the standard of excellence our customers expect and that we expect of ourselves."

Verizon said it would provide those affected with a $20 account credit redeemable through the myVerizon app.

"This credit isn't meant to make up for what happened," Verizon said in its statement. "No credit really can. But it's a way of acknowledging our customers' time and showing that this matters to us."

The company also said that if customers are still experiencing issues, they should restart their devices to reconnect to the network.

Verizon customers began reporting issues just before 12 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, according to Downdetector, which provides real-time crowdsourced updates on services and websites. The tracker showed that reports peaked at over 175,000 around 12:40 p.m. Verizon shared its first statement about the outage around 1 p.m.

Most of the reports came from East Coast cities like New York City and Atlanta, but there were also reports from places like Houston and San Francisco.

Verizon told customers the outage had been resolved in an X post just before 10:30 p.m. — over 9 hours later.

During the outage, New York City's Emergency Management office and Washington, D.C.'s public safety office issued alerts. Some of Verizon's rivals also used the outage as an opportunity to take some subtle jabs.

"Our network? Solid. If you're experiencing issues, it's not us..... it's the other guys. Some things are just out of our hands!" AT&T said an X post on Wednesday.

T-Mobile told customers that its network was working normally.

"However due to Verizon's reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time," the company said in its own X post.