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Volume up, volume down, the hold the power button until it shuts down and the Apple logo comes back.
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I’ve been chatting for hours and still not activated. Total bs.
 
It took me two hours on the phone with Verizon to figure this out. Steps to activate the new 5G SIM:

1. turn off old phone
(make sure Wifi is disconnected - I had to unplug my router)
2. shut down new phone
3. remove SIM card from new phone, then put the SIM back in
4. restart new phone
5. activate

For some reason you need to power off, take the SIM out, and power on again for the phone to "reset" the activation sequence, even if they try to activate on the Verizon end. I was the first person with a 12 that the V rep had talked to, so it took a while to troubleshoot.

It works great now!
 
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Trying that now.

Says "waiting for activation" may take some time.

How long did your take?

Do I need wifi on?
 
It took me two hours on the phone with Verizon to figure this out. Steps to activate the new 5G SIM:

1. turn off old phone
(make sure Wifi is disconnected - I had to unplug my router)
2. shut down new phone
3. remove SIM card from new phone, then put the SIM back in
4. restart new phone
5. activate

For some reason you need to power off, take the SIM out, and power on again for the phone to "reset" the activation sequence, even if they try to activate on the Verizon end. I was the first person with a 12 that the V rep had talked to, so it took a while to troubleshoot.

It works great now!

Didn't work for me.

Step 3 is when the phone is off?
 
I was just told by chat to leave the 5G sim in. Restart after 12am and it will work.

Not hopeful.
 
I had that problem last year. I took the sim out of my old iphone and put it in my new iphone. then it worked fine.
 
What about using your “old” LTE SIM - it should work even on 5G for now - and activate the 5G SIM in a week or so when they have worked out all the issues?
 
This happened to me too. I turned it off/on multiple times and still got the spinning wheel.

What worked for me was plugging it into my MacBook, and opening iPhone from Finder to finish the activation. It went smoothly after that.
 
Connecting it to an iMac didn’t help.

Tried restarting after 12am. Still waiting for activation.
 
Mine also would not activate with verizon. Tried using our account to push the activation through and kept getting a confirmation email that said failed. Tried several reboots with no success.

Finally gave up and called. Was on hold for 45 minutes here in the evening. Got a super helpful agent that got it activated in 5-10 minutes. Kept me on the line to test voice, message, and data.

This was for a 12Pro to replace an 11Pro. I usually so the SIM swap but couldn’t do that this time bc needed the new 5G SIM.

Phone agent did confirm Verizon was having a problem with the servers so lots of people having trouble activating. They can do it easily over the phone but the auto activations aren’t working for a lot of people.

she said their engineers are working on it and she expects it will be fixed soon. But in the meantime, just call, sit on hold, and it will eventually be resolved.

Hope this helps.
 
What number did you call?

I called 800 922-0204 six times after 8pm and was hung up on.
 
My phone works, at least from what I can tell, but in the ‘cellular’ setting I have this and I can’t choose any 4G 5g options, but everything else seems to be working as expected, ERY odd. Never had an issue like this with Apple.
Nothing is working for me. Can't call Verizon because the only line I have is the one I'm trying to activate on. I've restored my phone, I've turned it off and on. I've tried it with the sim and without the sim. Nothing is working.
Same here for this too
5092F1C1-C165-4683-9336-E7AD4FDBF2C6.jpeg
 
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I can't activate mine for some reason. Not sure what to do, I never seven saw a setup screen for cellular activation
 
You have to turn Find My iPhone off on the old phone, turn off the old phone, and then power cycle the new phone with WiFi off. Find My iPhone confuses the network when you restore because you have 2 phones with the same name on the network.
 
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So what the hell is going on at Verizon!! I haven't been able to activate my phone since I got it yesterday.
Two calls to Verizon for 2+ hours and a call to Apple, who hung up, and it's still not working. I guess I'll be trying
again today and I wonder if it will finally work.
 
My wife’s was fine. Mine errored on activation. The Verizon guy had me turn off WiFi and restart my phone. WiFi turned back on during restart, turned it back off. Then it activated. He said there was something about the WiFi not allowing the cellular side to connect to activate or something. He Didn’t have to do anything on his end.

So if anyone is running into issues today, give that a try before waiting on hold with Verizon.
 
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I was able to get through the iPhone setup process (after a few restarts at the activation stage), but when the transfer from my old phone finally finished I kept getting a popup saying activation failed. No mobile data or cellular at all (wifi was fine). I tried everything in this thread with no luck. I called Verizon this morning and the reason it wasn't working is that I had recently put in a change my cellular plan to go into effect next billing cycle. They had to cancel that then activate the phone. All is well now.
 
I had to do the chat this morning to get it to work, was not able to get it to work when I tried last night.
 
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