At least they’re honest about it :). Normally they’d let you badger an agent to escalate the issue to nowhere.

Trying to get to an agent is practically impossible. I called recently to make an account change, but after I went through the automated system I got an "I'm sorry, we see there is an outage in your area. Please wait for the outage to be resolved and then call back."

Insane.

I mean, what are you gonna do about it? Companies have so many customers and so much capital these days that they don't have to pretend anymore.

When I worked for Xerox doing outsourced Verizon phone support, the fastest way to get someone on the phone who actually worked for Verizon, was paid twice as much, had 100x the credit limit etc, was too tell the IVR "Disconnect service". I use this every time I have to call anything and usually get half decent service.

I wasn't even offered the phone tree to try that! It looked up my account from my phone number, told me there was an outage, said what I wrote above, and hung up.