“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” This is probably one of my favorite quotes, attributed to Mark Twain. It’s not exactly correct, what Mr. Twain actually said was “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” I usually think about this quote when I am asked to explain any long-term periods of absence, usually because of work or family care, or in pursuit of some quality “me” time.
I have frequently been asked, “What’s going on with you and Verizon and that 8 day outage?” So today, exactly two months after the outage, I thought that I would bring everyone up to speed regarding where things stand.
For those of you who are reading about our Verizon outage for the first time, back on January 10, 2022 our Verizon FIOS Internet stopped working. We were without service until January 19, 2022. Within this time we had one full day of service following a Verizon service call before the service failed again. Both outages had nothing to do with our on-premise Verizon equipment, or our own network. Both outages were entirely caused by Verizon themselves. You can read my original post here.
Since the outage, I have been trying to get Verizon to compensate us for the losses we endured during the 8 days we were without service. As part of that effort, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and several other consumer related agencies, and posted about the Verizon outage on several social media channels. While the Better Business Bureau was unable to mediate a satisfactory settlement, the responses from the social media postings did help to point us toward other legal resources, and hearing from other Verizon and former Verizon customers who experienced their own Verizon related nightmares helped us to realize that we were not the only consumers being taken advantage of.
For those of you searching the Better Business Bureau for my complaint, I have some disturbing news for you. The Better Business Bureau has chosen not to publish my complaint against Verizon. The Better Business Bureau chooses to publish complaints at its own discretion. How the Better Business Bureau chooses which complaints to publish is a mystery. That being said, and unless the Better Business Bureau can prove otherwise, my complaint was not published because Verizon requested that it not be published. If you still want to read my complaint regarding our Verizon experience, you can find the complaint published on the Pissed Consumer website.
Some of you have contacted me, asking; “Why have I stopped posting on social media?”, and; “When will I publish details pertaining to our legal action against Verizon?”
To answer the first question; I have had to shift my attention towards my day-to-day work as a systems administrator, and to the on-going role as a caregiver for my wife. This has left less time to communicate about our Verizon experience. This is about to change however, thanks to the advice that I have received from many of you about automating my social media posts using several highly rated tools. I have chosen a service that will allow me to author my social media posts when I have the greatest amount of free time, and perform the actual postings for me. This will allow me to setup posts about Verizon and our experience that can run for days, months and years with much less effort.
As for any legal actions against Verizon, that matter is still in the planning stage. The difficult part appears to be finding an attorney or law firm that will represent us for the small settlement that we desire, instead of seeking to expand our case into a monstrous class action circus.
I have also been asked how has our Verizon FIOS Internet service been since the outage? The truth is that we have continued to see short outages almost daily, most lasting about 1 hour and 43 minutes long. We have a monitoring system which is plugged directly into the Verizon router, and it has been collecting data for months. Since February 1, 2022 we have endured a total of about 26 hours in down time. For any of you fellow techies familiar with the “five-nines” concept, the up-time and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines, as in 99% or 99.9% or 99.999%. With our Verizon FIOS Internet down for a total of 26 hours, Verizon’s service is currently measuring a dismal 96.4% availability. Still better than the ultra-dismal 73.6% availability for the month of January, which included our outage. Just for comparison, the average up-time availability for Internet service providers is 99.9% availability.
In summary;
I am moving to an automated social media posting routine. So if Verizon was expecting me to take their abuse lying down, and being quiet about it, all bets are off! Verizon can expect my social media posts to increase massively, and continue until we agree on a settlement, or until I die. On second thought, since the posts will be automated, and my domains and accounts are well funded, my death won’t have any effect on my Verizon related social media posts for many years. I guess it will be like me posting about Verizon’s abuse from my grave.
I will continue to seek some legal remedy for our losses for Verizon’s role in causing our 8 day outage.
Future posts will cover updates to the current Verizon standoff, what we are now using for backup Internet connectivity, and who I am recommending for 5G Internet connectivity. Hint; It’s not Verizon.