When a major outage strikes, information becomes crucial—especially when it impacts millions of people. On September 30, 2024, Verizon users across the United States faced an unexpected disruption, leaving many without phone service and searching for answers. As a B2B SaaS platform that specializes in analyzing open-ended survey responses and verbatim comments, we saw an opportunity to leverage our tool in a unique way: by quickly identifying the states impacted by this Verizon outage, based on public comments on social media.
The Verizon Outage: A Real-Time Crisis
The outage began around 10:00 a.m. ET, with reports of service disruptions coming in through platforms like Downdetector and social media channels such as X/Twitter. Many Verizon customers were unable to make or receive calls, and their phones were stuck in SOS mode—a situation that affected both Android and iPhone users, even disabling Wi-Fi calling.
At that moment, many people took to social media to share their experiences and try to understand the scope of the issue. X was full of users asking if others in their states were affected. As we scrolled through the comments, we immediately realized that this was a perfect opportunity to showcase the power of our AI-powered coding tool for verbatim and open-ended survey responses.
From Tweets to Insights in Seconds
So here’s what we did:
- Downloaded the Comments: we downloaded over 700 comments from X platform about users sharing whether their states have been impacted.
- Uploaded Comments to Our Platform: we fed all those comments into our AI verbatim coding tool.
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Selected the Semi-Opened Coding Option: Our platform is designed to analyze open-ended responses in two main ways: fully open-ended and semi-open-ended.
- Fully Open-Ended Responses: For questions like “How’s your experience?” where the responses are entirely freeform, our AI can identify major themes and insights.
- Semi-Open-Ended Responses: For questions that are open-ended but have limited types of responses—such as “What’s your favorite city?”—our platform can quickly summarize the data into a unique list of mentions. This is the method we chose for analyzing the X comments about the Verizon outage.
- Hit “Generate”: we clicked the button and let the AI do its thing.
In just 35 seconds, the tool processed all those comments and gave us a comprehensive list of the states being reported. It even ranked them from the most mentioned to the least.
After clicking on any state in the list, you can see all the highlighted comments specifically mentioning that state. We posted the insights and screenshots on Twitter to help people quickly understand the affected areas.
Why This Matters: Turning Chaos into Clarity
This experience was a powerful example of how AI tools can transform chaotic, real-time data into clear insights that make a difference. The Verizon outage incident highlights just one of the many real-world applications of our AI-powered survey/verbatim coding tool. Whether it’s social media data during a crisis, open-ended survey responses from your customers, or interview data collected from various stakeholders, our platform can turn unstructured responses into actionable insights, helping you make faster, more informed decisions.