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Verizon’s enterprise cloud may go off line for 48 hours starting next Saturday at 1 a.m. EST for scheduled maintenance, notice of which got the Twitterverse in a bit of a tizzy this weekend.

A [company]Verizon[/company] spokesman confirmed that a major platform upgrade would take place starting January 10, but said the customer service rep probably overstated the amount of downtime they will experience. In a subsequent email, he said the work being done next weekend will enable future service updates to happen without impacting customers.

“We do these upgrades periodically, the last one being right before Thanksgiving and there was zero impact,” he said. In that case, all customer VMs were back up in 24 hours and most within 12 hours, he added.

Verizon had better hope that is the case because two days of downtime, even if the bulk of it happens over the weekend, is not anything any corporate account wants to experience.

Verizon, which initially got into “cloud” via its $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark in 2011 and then last year announced a brand new written-from-scratch “enterprise cloud,” is trying to compete with Amazon Web Services and a raft of other competitors for corporate accounts. The shutdown impacts that new Verizon cloud, not the legacy Enterprise Cloud versions, another spokesman said in a follow-up email.

Planned shutdowns for cloud maintenance are not unheard of. And sometimes cloud providers have to react faster to more unforseen issues. For example: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, IBM and others all had to regroup in late September/early October to address a Xen hypervisor security flaw.

Really puzzled how Verizon can claim they're competing in the same market as Amazon & Google. @cloudpundit @swardley pic.twitter.com/Bods5f2vHl — Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 1, 2015

Note: This report was updated at 7:51 p.m. PST with additional comment from Verizon about the nature of next week’s service update and again at 12:01 p.m. PST January 5 to reflect that Verizon said its legacy cloud offerings will not be affected by next week’s action.