Major glitch prevents Apple Watch Series 11 to be activated on Verizon, here’s a possible fix

Apparently, there’s a major problem and some of Apple’s smartwatches can’t be activated, which leads to, as you can imagine, a really frustrating experience.

There could be a fix, so if you’re in the same situation, read on.

What happened?

A Reddit user going by the name “bitflogger” described spending eight days and numerous hours trying to get a new Apple Watch Series 11 activated, and said the experience with Verizon support has been exhausting.

According to the user, support agents repeatedly struggled to read case notes, communicate clearly, or even see the right information when logged into the account. The person said they went through more than twenty attempts to pair, unpair, and reset the device, and even had Apple replace the watch, yet the issue continued.

The user explained they usually do not mind chat support or talking to agents in different countries, but this situation kept looping back to the same steps with no progress. They said the one US-based support person they reached did not understand the issue and never returned a promised call that Apple support had arranged.The user pointed out that they have been with Verizon for more than twenty years, have multiple lines, and also deal with the company as an enterprise customer, yet still saw what they viewed as a major decline in service. They argued that prices have gone up while support quality has gone down.

They also said reaching a supervisor or someone knowledgeable felt nearly impossible, and that calls often ended up routed overseas to agents who did not seem aware of the activation problem at all. After more than a week of repeating the same steps without a solution, the user said they were unsure what else to do and described the situation as a frustrating cycle with no clear path forward.

A possible solution

An “indirect representative” joined the discussion as said that smartwatches are “notoriously painful” to activate on the network. Plus, they claim there’s been “a glitch in the system for the last week”:

Image source – Reddit

They said the only solution they found was to activate the cellular plan, then switch to a different plan and switch back again, even though they did not understand why that worked. It reportedly took a coworker two and a half hours to figure that out. They also argued that unless missing a call would cost someone a huge amount of money, the hassle is not worth it. In their view, a Bluetooth watch works the same for everyday use as long as the phone is nearby.

In other Reddit threads, people say it’s the Number Share Plus plan to blame here and one should downgrade to the non-Plus Number Share variant:

Image source – Reddit

While several users point out that this strategy worked for them, the original poster said they’re not even on the Number Share Plus plan.

We’ve contacted Verizon and we’ll keep you posted when they reach out to us.