Verizon Services Back Up, But Outage Prompts Fail Hashtags on Twitter

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Image: Don Ryan/Associated Press

By Adario Strange2014-06-28 21:26:29 UTC

A billing information and service activation outage that affected a number of Verizon users and retailers has been fixed, according to a message from the company sent to users on Saturday.

Reports of the problem began cropping up on Friday, with some users unable to log into their My Verizon accounts to see billing information and some stores losing the ability to activate new subscribers.

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According to a spokesperson in contact with Mashable on Friday, the outage primarily affected those in the Northeast, Midwestern and some southern states.

Acknowledging the service issue, in addition to email messages, the company took to Twitter to update customers in real-time regarding the status of the outage.

"The Verizon Wireless billing system was fully restored early today, shortly after midnight," a Verizon spokesperson told Mashable on Saturday. "The issue affecting some customer access to account information was an unintended consequence of a software update performed by the company on its billing system two days ago… This did not in any way involve the network’s ability to connect calls, deliver text messages or provide data services."

The outage, which according to some lasted about 48 hours, was so impactful that it even generated its own #verizonfail and #verizonoutage hashtags.

However, despite Verizon's well-intentioned, social media-powered transparency, reactions on Twitter were mostly from frustrated customers.

In an interesting twist, several Twitter users claiming to work for Verizon weighed in on the outage. None of the messages claimed to be official statements representing the company, but they were nevertheless colorful and insightful during a time when many customers were looking for feedback from someone in the know.

Officially, Verizon emailed its customers directly with a service restoration update on Saturday, along with an apology for the My Verizon access outage.

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Topics: Apps and Software, Mobile, outages, Tech, Twitter, verizon, verizon wireless