Dave & Chuck the Freak talk about the Verizon outage yesterday that impacted hundreds of thousands of people. One of them being Andy, who led the charge for an angry group at a Verizon store.
00:00all right speaking of phones a lot of phones weren't active yesterday andy dealt with this
00:11as the show was ending and lisa and people wondering why their phone said sos and you
00:18could only make emergency calls on them it was a massive verizon outage but what caused it here's
00:25that story now I know it's a super competitive space they're all susceptible to the same kinds of problems in today's digital age our smartphones can feel full proof it creates this expectation that things should always work and when they don't a lot of people want to figure out how do I get compensated or isn't it time to switch providers or whatever the case might be valley tech expert brandon disney says the latest outage impacting hundreds of thousands of verizon customers is likely linked to one of two
00:55problems one which is the most common is some kind of human error where more than likely than not a an update of some sort was pushed out to expand the network upgrade speeds do something of that nature and the update went wrong the second a more nefarious possibility verizon's network has been targeted on possibility two would be some kind of hacking event or something like that where some malicious actor has done something but a little bit less likely in that case verizon wireless
01:25hasn't said what caused the widespread network outage but their customers are reporting seeing an sos icon in the top right corner of their smartphones preventing their ability to call text and browse the internet the sos mode is sort of the backup where it's trying to use either other carriers routes or some of the low earth orbit satellites that are out there for basic messaging and things according to the site down detector over 100,000 people reported having no
01:55no service on their phones across the u.s here in phoenix over 5,000 people reported experiencing the same problems disney says these are likely just a fraction of the total number of people impacted but before verizon customers go running to a new carrier disney says these kind of outages are not entirely common he warns against jumping ship to a new carrier even after the latest frustrating outage horizon i think their last major outage of this size
02:25was back in 2012 was back in 2012 so it's not something that happens real frequently but it does happen obviously
02:30yeah i mean if your phone didn't work for a couple hours i'm like that's it oh no
02:34andy's life almost fell apart we were talking about it it was freaky though this is the second time this happened the first time nobody talked about it but i was on the front lines of it because my phone was freaking out like like uh like my girlfriend would try to call me and it would ring once and then go to voicemail so it was like like i blocked her yeah you just ghosted her when i first started dating her so i like pulled into verizon i'm like we got problems
02:57i'm like get me the head person that's the highest ranking verizon person there is
03:04so i went in there and it was like they were like yeah phone's freaking out or whatever and then yesterday
03:09it started happening and i'm like okay it'll be over but then like late into the afternoon the thing's still
03:14going yeah the sos was still up there so again i pull into verizon you did no stop it because i didn't
03:20know i'm like is it billing complications i don't know i live i live on a you know crazy life
03:24yeah yeah so i pull i pull into verizon and it's like pandemonium there like everybody went there
03:31yeah everybody was like one kid that works in those stores usually they had a calming lady
03:37that was like oh that's nice that's quick we need the calming lady yeah they had like some uh verizon
03:42deployed calming lady that was standing there and there was like people there and i like walk in and it
03:47was funny because i came i became like the leader of the group real quickly it was oh yeah it was really
03:51weird i was like i'll do okay in an apocalypse i think but i like walked in and i was like uh
03:56everybody's like and i was like is this about the sos on your phone everyone and like everybody's like
04:02yeah we don't know what's happening we can't do our phones no and the lady was like we're experiencing
04:08an outage right now we don't know what's causing it and i'm like i'm speaking up for the crowd i'm like
04:14when is this gonna be over do they have any idea what's causing it yeah i started doing like a press
04:21conference in there i'm like will we be credited for this time i'm like is it for me a billion that's
04:31the first thing i asked i was like could it be a billion complication
04:34i said calm down everybody i got this i got this what does that even mean sos you can't do anything
04:43i tried it just kept saying call failed
04:47i uh spent most of my day yesterday driving to all the verizon stores and being like my phone's working
04:54my phone is working i'm on verizon and it's working yeah some verizon people i don't know why
05:00well that's what made me crazy yesterday because everybody else's phone was fine and i was just like
05:04what has happened i would have told you mine was bad but yeah i couldn't talk to you but i was just
05:08like you know there's not a lot of like pressing andy emergencies that was one of them that's one
05:14the crazy thing is on the local news they were at a verizon store i would have died if i had
05:19seen him oh him and his army it was like i like emerged through the crowd i'm like i'll speak for
05:26everyone he's got his brave heart face paint on it i was like i paid 150 a month i was like give me my
05:34service they didn't take on phones you paid and you paid you paid your bill the best of the best they said
05:42isn't that right isn't that right yeah s-o-s s-o-s s-o-s s-o-s s-o-s s-o-s let's kill them
05:55it was funny i was like s-o-s problems was one person looking at me and she was like yes
06:01everybody freaked out everybody was losing her mind it was crazy i was like it's all right everyone
06:08it's all right it's just like a guy opening a can of beans that he needed to eat oh yeah he
06:14didn't need he was just scared i was like it's okay man we can still get food yeah it's right
06:19over there when the power goes we're dead no yeah oh man we lose our cell phone for a couple hours
06:24that all hell breaks loose there was a lot when this reporter was on live there was a lineup out
06:28the door of people oh that's crazy all you have to say is hey we don't know what's going on everybody
06:32you just google it i just googled s-o-s on phone and it was like a verizon outage right you know
06:36that's all well i couldn't google anything yeah you didn't have wi-fi somewhere though
06:41i guess i didn't really i just like kind of gave up once it didn't do like home wi-fi or
06:47anywhere wi-fi here yeah well i was running around yesterday a little bit oh yeah i was out and about
06:53i just felt so weird without like any ability so your phone as long as you got wi-fi you could do
07:00like you could get on the internet and do i message oh i didn't know right okay yeah but lenny has
07:05verizon too and he he was fine so i'm like that's strange yeah it only targeted a certain
07:10amount of it wasn't the whole network my phone was off but my ipad was on oh okay which was funny
07:17so on my drive home i just connected uh to a hot spot on my ipad and i was good oh hot spots yeah
07:23there you go but everything worked out you it was crazy here yeah your crowd i left i was like a
07:29badass they were i bet people were like who was that yeah what a leader what a hero and a champion
