Verizon Communications is offering wireless customers affected by Wednesday’s outage a $20 account credit, apologizing for an hourslong service interruption that a spokesman said was tied to an issue with a software update.

Lee McKnight, a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, said that 5G networks increasingly run on hundreds of cloud services — along with cell towers and fiber wires — that operate in tandem, require constant updates and are subject to software hiccups that can ripple through the larger network.

Verizon says it's working on a solution for the national service disruption many customers experienced on Jan. 14.

A federal judge dismissed a ​lawsuit by CrowdStrike shareholders who said the cybersecurity company defrauded them by concealing ‌its inadequate software testing and quality assurance procedures, before a July 2024 outage crashed more than 8 million Microsoft Windows-based computers worldwide.

ZDNET's key takeaways Thousands of Verizon customers reported experiencing a data outage over the past 24 hours.This prevents users from making phone calls and browsing on cellular networks.While Verizon has resolved the issue,

Verizon’s outage yesterday was bad, but it proved the company knows one thing: When things go wrong, humans want to speak to humans.