By Something else of Big Red’s seems to be down but it isn’t the data network this time. A growing thread over at their support forums is filled with users who have been unable to activate newly purchased phones.
One person says they had no problem activating their newly-purchased Android phone, but one person out of five pages of users isn’t quite convincing that this isn’t a small hiccup. Some have been trying to activate their phones for the past 24 hours, apparently.
We’re not sure if their device activation service went down due to the LTE network going down yesterday (which has since been fixed) but the timing is definitely strange. If you’re planning on buying a new phone today and you try to activate but it fails (not saying it well as we’re not sure how widespread this issue is) you may be out of a phone until something gives. Let us know if any of you are experiencing the same. [Thanks Jamie!]
Well I’m experiencing no 3G right now… as is my Wife. Ugh. Withdrawl.
Haven’t been able to activate yesterday or today so far.
Some time during the night, I lost ALL phone service. My two week old Nexus is only working on WIFI. No data, No Phone just WIFI. Not only that but I cannot change over to my old phone according to Verizon Tech Support because of this outage.
VERIZON THE MOST RELIABLE NETWORK——–NOT.
Verizon is SUCK! XD
been trying to reactivate my bionic, no dice on activating, i was on the phone with verizon last night and they said that they are in deed having in issue with activations and its from LTE being down
Well, it would’ve mattered to me but neither Amazon nor UPS know where my Galaxy Nexus is… Was supposed to arrive within about 3 hours. Now I’m waiting for a callback from an Amazon manager. On Amazon, the phone has a 1 to 3 week back order and if I go to a store I have to pay $100 more plus I’ll lose my $100 Amazon gift card.
Pity the one time Amazon and UPS get something lost in between them it has to be my new phone and not like a $2 cord. =( Usually love them, no problems ever before, literally!
Sorry, ranting. sad face :(
I had the same problem with an upgrade on 2nd line that was supposed to have been shipped on 12/22 and arive 12/27. Tracking number in UPS simply said a a label was prepared but never picked up. I had to wait till yesterday before the could cancel order. They aren’t able to reprocess the order since that have none and no idea when they will. They credited my visa the 249 and gave me $30 voucher i can use on amazon. Called wirefly and order for $229 and is arriving today by fedex (crossing fingers)…
You can simply pay a $2 “Convenience Fee” to activate your phone by phone or online. You can avoid this charge by having a rep at a kiosk or store do it for you though.
/sarcasm
Dude, don’t give them ideas.
Exactly, especially those of us that SBF and flash ROMs. Can you imagine having to pay each time you reactivate your phone? I can see it now, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did this sometime in the future with all the people that reactivate their phones after flashing a new ROM or SBFing.
In so cal 4g didn’t come back on till like 9:00pm last night. It makes since they would have activation problems too.
just activated my trophy without any problems.
Been trying to activate my new 4S for 24 hours. Spent two hours (with my 1-year-old son) at the Verizon store yesterday before finally they told me this is a network issue and there is nothing they can do about it. I called last night, after being at the store for two hours, and the customer rep tried to help me for about 35 minutes before he talked to someone up the chain who told finally told him something is wrong with the activation network. He recommended trying again today to activate using *228. Still nothing. It is pretty awful.
Complain to Apple as it is their server preventing your iphone from activating. Now for the real question…why are you here with an iphone?
That is so wrong to me… I just do not freaking understand how in any world they can justify this sort of behavior towards consumers… What has VZW not completely furked up this month? Honestly??? The release of the GN was a freaking horror story for so many people just waiting for it, the data issues, the issue with activations, now the billing scandal… I know they have great coverage and are usually decent reliability wise, but I swear you people are masochists… Please for the sake of all that is good and holy please people start switching over to the other guys preferably gsm’s you can save your self some battery life some cash and some screaming across a service counter.
They need to get rid of this shitty eHRPD network. Overlay what you’ve got with HSPA… make all your future phones HSPA/LTE combos. Voice quality is better on GSM anyways, and with VoLTE coming down the line, coupled with their fast expansion of LTE, the HSPA network can be swiss cheese for all it will matter.
You think they’ll scrap their entire CDMA network for GSM?
We got dozens of new phones here at my company on Tuesday and all day we experienced issues activating them. Some applied after 2 failed attempts, others took 2-3 hours before they finally activated.
Yesterday was slightly better, but still some failures that had to be retried.
Keep trying. It’ll eventually go through, even though it may take a very long time.
4G LTE from VZW had SIM-OTA failures. They stopped all 4G activations to work on it and tried to force all 4G devices onto the 3G network. Also at the same time, some iphones were unable to activate as well due to an Apple server error that wouldnt manually program the phone before activations…
There is a major problem with iPhones ordered through vzw direct fulfillment. The sim cards are not active on Apple’s server…. major headache right now!
I’ve been trying to activate 2 Galaxy Nexus’s (maybe Nexi?) since they were delivered from Amazon around 4pm yesterday. I finally went down to my local Verizon store and spoke with a rep. She popped the sim card out and plugged the card number into the system. She noted that they were already active, and did some more clicking around. Then she re-inserted the sim and started the activation and it worked. She repeated the same for the other GNex. Not sure what she actually did, but I would suggest that anyone having issues activating visit their local Verizon store.
As a side note, another rep was working on activating an iPhone 4S, and they were talking about how it had to be set up OTA because iTunes activation wasn’t working.
was just at verizon, they got a bad batch of Iphone 4s’, which is screwing everything up, i went to the store and they reactivated my Bionic good as new :)
Erg,
this whole thing makes me so angry. Its not even the fact of the extra 24 dollars a year but in light
of all the really crappy things they have been doing with device
launches like the Galazy Nexus and the 3 service problems this month the
timing on that decision was really really really poor. I really think
that if giants like Verizon, Apple, Netflix, don’t learn to chill the
eff out they are going to end up demolishing their customer base. How
dare people complain about the att-tmobile merger… stop worrying about
a possible monopoly/shady game playing and worry about the ones that
already exist… I hate to see people get taken advantage of, in this
economy that is 24 dollars a year that some family is currently
depending on to get by so I assume that is why it really bothers me so
much.
I can’t activate my Galaxy Nexus, have been trying for over 24 hours….verizon tech support keeps saying just wait 1 more hour….fail