Did Verizon really just fumble on four plays in a row?

By now, most of the country was either directly affected by or has seen the news that one of the nation’s largest wireless carries suffered a widespread and lengthy outage during the past week. This isn’t a tragedy by itself. It happens.

But while the first misstep is a routine misfortune in the normal course of business-an indication that something needs to be tightened or upgraded somewhere along the lines of the process-the next several are all self-created errors.

Last night, just before 10:00 P.M., I got a text offering a $20 credit and a lengthy apology. That Verizon was slightly condescending (“On average, this covers multiple days of service…”) sounds as if one junior person in the damage control department sent out the first draft of a mea culpa and asked exactly no one else at the company for any perspective.  It’s as if they were trying to make failure sound like a BOGO.

Inexplicably, the credit is per account, not per phone line. So, anyone working remotely, needed to call a doctor, or a suddenly floundering Door Dasher with a big family and multiple lines might end up with less than five bucks per.

The important part is the text itself. If you have Verizon, re-read it and then be sure to compare it to the next scam text you get for supposedly having an unpaid speeding ticket or tollbooth violation. They’re similar in length, language, and structure. It asks you to click on a link which is “m.vzw.com/MBrf9gFO”. For real. A cellular company that just had an infuriating and frustrating ten-hour outage sent a link that reads like the typical smishing and. It is a URL so generic and non-descriptive that it looks exactly like something Scattered Spider would send out.

Ignoring the fact for the moment that if people just spent hours without their phone, and you wanted to give them an account credit, Verizon could just give them an account credit. Instead, they’re limiting the twenty clams only to the type of people who would also click on the link to resolve the customs duty they owe on some shipment they didn’t order.

To sum it up: a company everyone already can’t stand had a common problem, insulted their disgruntled customers, then insulted their customers anew, before finally trying to emphatically not give them any accommodation for a service failure that, depending on the customer, ranges from middling inconvenient all the way up to financially damaging.

Cue the class action litigators and believe me, I wish them nothing but success in battle.