Utahns share experiences of being impacted by Verizon outage

SALT LAKE CITY — You may have been one of the lucky ones, but thousands of Verizon customers across the country didn't have service on Monday.

Monday morning, people woke up to a new week, and for some Verizon customers, a non-working phone.

“I thought maybe I didn’t pay my bill because it said 'SOS,' and it turns out it was just a nationwide outage. So I’ve been here probably all day,” said Chauntelle Rodriguez, a Verizon customer.

Around 10 a.m. Monday morning, Verizon News posted on "X" saying engineers are engaged and working quickly to solve the issue.

“My neighbor is in a physical rehab facility right now and so he called me and asked me to come get his phone to bring it to the Verizon to see if they could fix it,” said Gordon Tremelling.

By the time he got to the store in the late afternoon, some devices were back to normal.

"Well, he was pretty upset about it, so I think he’ll be very happy about it to have it back,” Tremelling said.

Throughout most of the day on FOX 13's Facebook post about the phone problems, we saw hundreds of customers sharing their frustrations.

“Well, it’s the way we are — we expect them to work. When the electricity goes out, we would die within a couple of hours, you know? We really depend on these things,” said Tremelling.

Rodriguez told FOX 13 News that several people came into the Verizon store she was at for most of the day.

"Quite a few of my family, my friends, my coworkers. Just being here alone there was probably 300 or 400 just coming in complaining,” said Rodriguez.

Other impacts that we saw online were parent/student pickup, businesses, and families just trying to contact one another. One customer we spoke with said she’s just grateful that she didn’t need her phone for work on Monday.

“It would’ve been very annoying, and I can only imagine what my employees were dealing with today just because they did have to work, so hopefully they get it all resolved soon,” said Rodriguez.

By the end of the day, customers were just thankful they could phone a friend once again.

“Well, it happens. At least they got it taken care of in one day,” said Tremelling.

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