Redditor AbeFroman21 posted that he and his family are without power or internet due to Hurricane Florence, and that Verizon has throttled their internet access to an unusable trickle, offering to unblock them if they pay for a higher tier of service.
The incident recalls last month’s news that Verizon was throttling firefighters battling California’s record-breaking wildfires, refusing to unblock them unless they paid for a more expensive account.
My family lives in a small town in eastern North Carolina, and we were just devastated by the hurricane. Our power has been out for five days now and internet service is gone as well. Two days ago my wife and I noticed that we couldn’t retrieve our email from our phone or check Facebook dr updates from our community about the storm or when service would be restored.We traveled into a bigger town and called Verizon to check and see if there was a data outage and when we could expect it to be restored. Only, I was told that my unlimited plan was deprioritized for being to low tier of a plan. But if I upgraded to a higher plan my service would be restored.
There’s no outage, just corporations sucking dry a community that as already lost so much. Thanks assholes.
Big shout out to Verizon for throttling data for people in Eastern North Carolina without power or internet. Thanks assholes. [AbeFroman21/Late Stage Capitalism]