Verizon Outage 2024: What Happened and Why 911 Failed [2025]

Introduction: When America's Biggest Telecom Network Goes Dark

Imagine you're stuck on the side of the highway with a flat tire. Your phone shows no signal. You need to call for help, so you punch 911 into your phone. Nothing happens. The call won't go through. For millions of Americans, this wasn't an imaginary scenario on a Wednesday afternoon—it was reality.

A massive outage at Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in the United States, knocked out service for customers across the nation starting around noon ET. But this wasn't just an inconvenience for people who couldn't text their friends or scroll social media. The outage compromised emergency services. People trying to dial 911 found themselves unable to connect to emergency responders. Some phones switched to SOS mode, showing they could only make emergency calls—except those calls weren't actually going through to anyone.

This was the kind of outage that makes you realize how completely dependent we've become on wireless networks. Verizon doesn't just handle phone calls anymore. It's woven into the fabric of modern American life: emergency response systems, business communications, hospital networks, financial transactions, and countless other critical services all depend on it.

The incident raises fundamental questions about infrastructure resilience. How can one of the world's largest telecommunications companies experience a service failure that affects millions? Why did the backup systems designed to handle emergencies fail? And what does this tell us about the fragility of systems we assumed were bulletproof?

This article breaks down exactly what happened during the Verizon outage, why it happened, who was affected, and what it means for the future of telecom reliability. We'll examine the cascading failures, the emergency response, the lessons learned, and what customers should do to protect themselves from similar incidents.

TL; DR

• Scope: Verizon's outage affected millions of customers nationwide, with reports starting around noon ET on Wednesday
• 911 Impact: Some emergency calls failed to connect, forcing DC and other municipalities to warn residents to use alternative carriers or landlines for emergencies
• Collateral Damage: AT&T and T-Mobile customers also experienced service disruptions due to interconnection failures with downed Verizon infrastructure
• Duration: The outage lasted several hours before service was gradually restored
• Systemic Risk: The incident exposed vulnerabilities in how telecom carriers interconnect and backup systems for critical services like 911

Estimated data suggests that approximately 100 million Verizon customers were affected, with additional impacts on AT&T and T-Mobile customers due to call routing issues.

What Actually Happened: The Timeline of Disruption

The outage didn't announce itself with a bang. It started quietly, around noon ET on Wednesday, when Verizon customers began noticing their phones weren't connecting to calls or data. At first, a few reports trickled in. Then dozens. Then thousands. By early afternoon, the outage tracking site Down Detector showed a massive spike in service disruption reports.

What made this incident unique wasn't just its scale—it was that it happened so suddenly without obvious warning signs. Verizon had no public notice that something was about to break. One moment, the network was functioning normally. The next, it was struggling under massive demand as millions of users simultaneously tried to make calls, text, and access data.

The SOS mode issue became a critical problem. When phones can't connect to their primary carrier, many modern devices automatically switch to what's called "emergency SOS mode." This feature is designed to let you make calls to 911 even without signal. Except in this case, even though phones showed they could make emergency calls, the calls weren't actually connecting to emergency dispatch centers.

This is where the situation became genuinely dangerous. A customer experiencing a medical emergency, a car accident victim, or someone in immediate danger would see their phone show they could call for help—and then experience nothing when they tried. No connection. No dispatcher picking up. Just silence.

The failure revealed a gap in how backup systems were designed. Emergency services assumed that if a phone showed it could make an emergency call, that call would actually reach someone. But the infrastructure to route those emergency calls through alternative networks wasn't working as intended.

Verizon's official statement was deliberately vague: "We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly." The company didn't provide specifics about the cause, the scope, or expected resolution time—information that would have helped customers and emergency services understand the situation.

During the same timeframe, AT&T and T-Mobile customers also began reporting service disruptions. However, these reports were likely related to the Verizon outage rather than independent failures. When one carrier's network goes down, it can cascade through interconnected networks because carriers rely on each other to route calls and data.

A T-Mobile spokesperson confirmed this relationship, stating that T-Mobile's service was "operating optimally" but that "T-Mobile customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time." This is a critical distinction: the problem wasn't T-Mobile's infrastructure, but rather the interconnection between T-Mobile and Verizon.

DC's Office of Unified Communications issued an official emergency alert at 12:57 PM ET, telling residents: "If you have an emergency and cannot connect using your Verizon Wireless device, please connect using a device from another carrier, a landline, or go to a police district or fire station to report the emergency."

This was an extraordinary situation. Emergency services were advising people to physically leave their homes and go to police stations to report emergencies, rather than being able to call for help. In an era of instant communication, the absence of wireless connectivity suddenly made people feel like they'd been thrown back decades.

The outage lasted several hours, with service gradually being restored throughout the afternoon and evening. But the damage to trust was immediate and lasting.

Estimated data shows varying compliance levels with FCC requirements and industry standards, highlighting areas for improvement in telecommunications reliability and response.

The Scale: How Many People Lost Service?

Exact numbers are difficult to pin down because Verizon never released comprehensive statistics about the outage. But we can estimate based on market data and outage tracking information.

Verizon's market position: Verizon is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with approximately 150 million wireless subscribers. That's roughly 45% of all US mobile subscribers. When Verizon goes down, you're losing service for nearly half of all Americans who use wireless phones.

Not every single Verizon customer experienced the outage. Some areas and service types were affected more severely than others. But Down Detector showed a massive nationwide spike in reports, suggesting the outage affected millions of customers.

What made this particularly significant was the critical nature of those affected. Emergency responders couldn't reach people on Verizon phones. Hospitals lost connectivity for some systems. Businesses couldn't communicate with employees. Financial institutions experienced disruptions. The ripple effects extended far beyond just the direct subscribers who lost service.

The interconnection issue meant the impact extended beyond Verizon's own customers. People with AT&T or T-Mobile phones trying to call Verizon customers found those calls failing. This created a one-directional communications breakdown: you could receive calls from Verizon users if their phones were configured a certain way, but new outbound calls from other carriers to Verizon numbers wouldn't complete.

The financial impact, while not disclosed, was likely substantial. Every hour of downtime for major carriers costs millions in lost revenue, plus the costs of dealing with customer support calls, credit adjustments, and regulatory inquiries. For businesses relying on Verizon for communications infrastructure, the costs extended to productivity losses, missed transactions, and in some cases, diverted business to competitors.

The real impact, however, was measured in stress and fear. Millions of people experienced the disorienting feeling of being unable to communicate when they needed to. Parents couldn't reach their kids. Workers couldn't contact employers. People in genuine emergencies couldn't get help. That psychological impact lasted long after service was restored.

Why Emergency Services Failed: The 911 Problem

The failure of 911 calls during the Verizon outage represents one of the most serious aspects of the incident. Emergency services exist as the ultimate backup when everything else fails. When emergency services themselves fail, you've hit a critical vulnerability in modern infrastructure.

Here's how 911 calls are supposed to work in theory: When you dial 911 from a wireless phone, your call is routed through your carrier's network to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), which is the emergency dispatch center serving your area. That PSAP then dispatches appropriate emergency responders.

The system has multiple redundancies built in. If your primary carrier's network fails, your phone is supposed to be able to switch to another carrier's network to complete the emergency call. This is called "emergency call routing" or "fallback to alternative carrier."

Except that's not what happened during the Verizon outage. When Verizon's network went down, the fallback mechanisms didn't work as designed. Some phones showed they could make emergency calls, but those calls weren't reaching PSAPs. Others couldn't even initiate the call.

The technical issue appears to involve call routing infrastructure. When a 911 call comes in, the system needs to quickly determine which PSAP should handle it based on the caller's location. This requires accessing network routing tables, determining jurisdiction, and directing the call appropriately. If that infrastructure is overloaded or misconfigured, calls can fail even if the underlying network is functioning.

Additionally, Verizon's interconnection with other carriers—the agreements and technical infrastructure that allow calls to pass between networks—appears to have failed in a way that prevented emergency calls from being rerouted to alternative carriers.

The 911 system in America is decentralized and fragmented. There's no single national 911 network. Instead, there are thousands of independent PSAPs operated by municipalities, counties, and regional authorities. This fragmentation creates vulnerabilities. When a carrier experiences an outage, it can disrupt interconnections with multiple PSAPs simultaneously.

Furthermore, many PSAPs still rely on E-911 technology (enhanced 911) that was developed in the 1990s. This technology is aging, and the infrastructure to support failover to alternative carriers was not designed with modern outage scenarios in mind. It was designed assuming carrier networks would be relatively stable and that only localized outages would occur.

Verizon's network is so large and so central to US telecommunications that an outage affects not just Verizon users, but the entire emergency services infrastructure. The system doesn't have a good backup for when one of the biggest carriers goes down.

During the outage, emergency services had to work around the system rather than rely on it. DC's emergency alert was explicit about this: go to a police station or use a different carrier. Essentially, the official response was "our system failed, so do it the old-fashioned way."

This revealed a uncomfortable truth: emergency services are only as reliable as their underlying infrastructure, and that infrastructure is controlled by profit-driven telecommunications companies. When one company's network fails, millions of people lose the ability to call for emergency help.

This bar chart compares the duration and customer impact of major outages across Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Comcast. Estimated data shows that AT&T had the longest outage duration affecting the most customers.

The Interconnection Problem: Why Other Carriers Were Affected

One of the most important lessons from the Verizon outage is understanding how interconnected modern telecommunications networks are. The fact that AT&T and T-Mobile customers also experienced service disruptions wasn't a coincidence—it was a direct consequence of how carriers are wired together.

Carrier interconnection is the technical and business framework that allows different carriers' networks to communicate with each other. When you call someone on a different carrier, your call doesn't magically transfer between networks. Instead, it travels from your carrier's network to an interconnection point, then continues on the recipient's carrier's network.

Think of it like the US highway system. Verizon's network is like Interstate 95. AT&T's network is like Interstate 81. When you need to travel from Boston to Atlanta, your route might use I-95 for part of the journey, then transition to I-81. There are connection points where these highways meet, and if one highway is closed, traffic on the other highways backs up at those connection points.

When Verizon's network failed, it didn't just stop serving Verizon customers. It also failed to accept incoming calls from other carriers. Imagine a highways scenario where Interstate 95 completely closes down. Not only can't cars travel on I-95, but cars on I-81 trying to reach I-95 get stuck at the connection point. That backup spreads to other highways as well.

Interconnection agreements between carriers specify exactly how this handoff works. They define bandwidth capacity, traffic routing, billing arrangements, and—theoretically—failover procedures for when one side of the connection fails.

But those agreements apparently didn't account for a failure as catastrophic as what Verizon experienced. When one carrier's infrastructure fails at the scale Verizon did, it exceeds the assumptions built into interconnection agreements.

The technical mechanism of the failure likely involved core routing equipment becoming overwhelmed or misconfigured. When Verizon's network went down, the routing tables that direct traffic need to be updated. If that update fails or is incomplete, calls can get lost in the handoff between networks.

Another possibility is that load balancing failed. During normal operations, load balancers distribute traffic across multiple paths. If primary paths fail, traffic is supposed to automatically route through backup paths. If those backup systems were themselves overwhelmed or misconfigured, they couldn't handle the surge of traffic from customers trying to reach Verizon.

What's particularly concerning is that Verizon's interconnection infrastructure failed to gracefully degrade. Instead of slower service, service failed entirely. Instead of routing calls around the failed infrastructure, it gave up and dropped them.

This suggests that redundancy was insufficient. Proper network design includes not just primary infrastructure and backup infrastructure, but tertiary failover systems. It appears Verizon either didn't have these in place for interconnection points, or those systems also failed.

The incident also highlighted a regulatory gap. The FCC requires carriers to maintain certain service standards and to file reports after major outages. But the rules around interconnection resilience are less stringent than they should be. Carriers aren't required to maintain interconnection capacity sufficient to handle major outages at connected carriers.

Root Causes: What Went Wrong?

Verizon never publicly disclosed the exact technical cause of the outage, which is both understandable from a security perspective and frustrating from a transparency perspective. However, industry experts and technical analysts could make educated guesses based on the symptoms and timeline.

Possible cause #1: Configuration error

Many major telecom outages are caused by seemingly small configuration errors that cascade into system-wide failures. A typo in a configuration file, a parameter set incorrectly, or a feature enabled in the wrong order can cause the entire network to fail.

The sudden onset of the Verizon outage (as opposed to gradual degradation) suggests something was suddenly changed or misconfigured rather than something slowly degrading. This points toward a deployment or configuration change that went wrong.

When companies deploy changes to massive networks serving millions of customers, they typically do so in stages: deploy to a small percentage of the system first, monitor for issues, then gradually roll out to the rest. However, if a critical configuration is deployed globally all at once, or if a change affects a core component used by the entire network, the failure will be instantaneous and widespread.

Possible cause #2: Software bug

Modern telecom networks are controlled by increasingly sophisticated software systems. Routing decisions, load balancing, resource allocation—all of these are managed by software. A critical bug in that software could cause system-wide failures.

Large software systems often have edge cases and corner cases that don't manifest until they hit specific scenarios. A particular combination of network conditions might trigger a bug that causes the software to crash or enter a bad state.

Given that Verizon likely experienced a surge in traffic as customers reacted to the outage (trying to call customer service, switching carriers, etc.), the software might have hit a scaling limit it wasn't designed to handle.

Possible cause #3: Hardware failure

Telecom networks rely on specialized hardware: routers, switches, optical amplifiers, and other equipment. If critical hardware fails—especially core network equipment that processes a large percentage of traffic—it can bring down major portions of the network.

Hardware failures are typically handled by failover systems: when primary hardware fails, traffic automatically switches to backup hardware. But if the backup hardware also fails, or if the failover mechanism itself fails, you get a complete outage.

Possible cause #4: Cascading failure

Often, network outages don't have a single root cause. Instead, they result from a sequence of failures that cascade into a system-wide collapse.

For example: Hardware fails, causing traffic to shift to backup systems. The backup systems, now overloaded, start dropping traffic. The traffic drop causes the network monitoring system to misunderstand the situation and make incorrect routing decisions. Those incorrect routing decisions cause a different part of the network to become overloaded. And so on.

This cascading failure scenario is particularly dangerous because by the time you understand what's happening, multiple parts of the system are already in failure states.

What we know for certain: The outage was widespread, affecting customers across multiple states and service types (both voice and data). This suggests the failure was at a core network level rather than affecting individual cell towers or regional hubs. The failure was sudden rather than gradual, suggesting an abrupt event rather than slow degradation. And the failure persisted for several hours despite being discovered almost immediately, suggesting it took significant time to identify and fix the underlying problem.

These facts point toward either a configuration deployment that went wrong, or a fundamental software or hardware failure in core network infrastructure. Fixing such failures takes time because engineers need to carefully diagnose the problem, isolate affected systems, and restore service in a way that doesn't create secondary failures.

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile together control approximately 95% of the U.S. wireless market, highlighting the concentration of infrastructure in the telecommunications industry. Estimated data based on industry reports.

Service Restoration: Bringing the Network Back Online

Once Verizon engineers identified that a critical outage was occurring, the process of restoring service began. However, bringing down a massive nationwide network is vastly different from bringing it back up.

With millions of customers all trying to access the network simultaneously at the moment service is restored, the initial restoration creates a thundering herd problem. Every phone that went offline suddenly tries to reconnect at the same moment. Every application tries to reconnect to the network. Every IoT device tries to reestablish its connection.

This sudden surge of demand can actually cause a restored network to fail again if the restoration isn't done carefully. Engineers have to bring systems online in a specific sequence, allowing each layer to stabilize before adding the next layer of load.

The restoration process typically follows this sequence:

1. Verify the fix: Before bringing any customers back online, engineers verify that the underlying problem has actually been fixed. This involves testing the fix on isolated equipment and running simulations to make sure it works.

2. Bring core network infrastructure online: The deepest layers of the network—the core routers and switches that form the backbone of the network—are brought online first. These are tested to ensure they're functioning correctly.

3. Gradually add regional infrastructure: Regional networks and distribution hubs are brought online in stages, not all at once. This allows the core network to handle the load gradually rather than being hit with the entire country's traffic at once.

4. Enable customer-facing infrastructure: Cell towers, switches, and other infrastructure that directly serves customers are brought online.

5. Monitor closely and prepare for rollback: Throughout the restoration, engineers monitor network performance carefully. If the restored configuration starts failing again, they're ready to immediately roll back to a previous stable state and try a different approach.

The Verizon outage took several hours to restore, which is typical for major outages. Emergency services continued to recommend that customers use alternative carriers or landlines even after Verizon announced service was being restored, because the restoration process takes time and service may be spotty initially.

Lessons from restoration: The fact that Verizon was able to restore service suggests that the underlying network infrastructure itself wasn't physically damaged. If hardware had been destroyed, restoration would have taken much longer or might have required shipping replacement equipment. The relatively quick restoration suggests the problem was software or configuration-related and was fixable by deploying a corrected configuration.

Regulatory and Industry Response

After the outage was resolved, regulators and industry observers immediately began calling for investigations and improvements. The incident raised serious questions about whether the telecommunications industry was adequately preparing for and responding to outages.

FCC involvement: The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates telecommunications in the United States, opened an investigation into the incident. The FCC has authority to fine carriers for outages that affect public safety and for failure to meet certain service standards.

Under FCC rules, carriers are required to:

• Maintain service redundancy and failover systems
• Report major outages to the FCC
• Maintain backup power at facilities (many cell towers have batteries and generators)
• Test their emergency response procedures
• Maintain adequate staffing to respond to outages

But compliance with these requirements is uneven, and penalties for violations are often considered just a cost of doing business by large carriers. A $10 million fine is painful but not crippling to a company as large as Verizon.

Industry standards: The telecommunications industry has standards bodies that recommend practices for network reliability and outage response. The American Telephone & Telegraph standards (from the old AT&T monopoly days) set a target of "five-nines" reliability: 99.999% uptime, or approximately 25 seconds of downtime per year.

A multi-hour outage affecting 150 million customers is a massive deviation from that standard. However, these standards are recommendations, not hard requirements, and meeting them is technically and economically challenging.

Congressional attention: Members of Congress, particularly those on committees overseeing telecommunications, called for investigations and hearings. Some representatives suggested that companies like Verizon should be required to maintain even higher redundancy standards.

However, industry observers noted that requiring higher standards inevitably increases costs, which carriers typically pass on to consumers through higher prices. There's a tension between wanting perfect reliability and wanting affordable service.

Industry self-regulation: The telecommunications industry has a history of resisting government regulation by claiming they'll self-regulate. After the Verizon outage, Verizon and other carriers made statements about their commitment to reliability and their investment in infrastructure.

Verizon stated it would conduct a full internal review of the outage and implement improvements. However, the specifics of those improvements were not disclosed. And given that Verizon had already experienced significant outages in the past (in 2019 and other years), skeptics questioned whether new promises would result in substantive change.

Estimated data suggests the Verizon outage's total financial impact ranges from

Comparative Analysis: How Other Carriers Handle Outages

While the Verizon outage was major, it's worth comparing it to outages experienced by other carriers to understand industry standards and vulnerabilities.

AT&T's 2022 outage: AT&T experienced a major nationwide outage in February 2022 that affected millions of customers. The outage was caused by maintenance work on the network that went wrong. AT&T customers couldn't make calls, send texts, or use data for approximately 5-7 hours depending on location.

AT&T initially didn't disclose details about the cause, but later reported that the outage was caused by an error during a network change. Like the Verizon outage, it suggests that change management processes weren't sufficiently careful or tested before deployment.

T-Mobile's 2021 outage: T-Mobile experienced a significant outage in March 2021 that lasted several hours and affected the ability of customers to make calls and use data. T-Mobile later disclosed that the outage was caused by a failure in the company's network routing system.

T-Mobile was somewhat more transparent about the cause than other carriers typically are, which earned them some credit from transparency advocates. However, the outage still happened, suggesting that despite T-Mobile's efforts, they hadn't solved the problem of critical system failures.

Comcast's 2014 911 outage: In 2014, Comcast experienced a major outage that affected emergency services in Philadelphia. Hundreds of 911 calls failed to reach dispatchers during the outage. Comcast was fined heavily for the incident and was required to implement improvements.

Yet despite that fine and the requirements, the Verizon outage shows that the problem of 911 failures during major outages persists across the industry.

International comparisons: Telecom outages aren't unique to the United States. However, some countries have different regulatory structures that potentially provide better protection.

In the EU, carriers are required to meet stricter service level agreements and face heavier penalties for violations. In Japan, carriers maintain lower outage rates partly due to cultural attitudes toward service quality and partly due to regulatory pressure.

However, even well-regulated international carriers have experienced major outages. A 2022 outage in Japan affected millions despite stringent regulations. The fundamental issue—that large complex systems sometimes fail—isn't solved by regulation alone.

The Human Cost: What Happened to Real People

While the technical details are interesting, the real story of the Verizon outage is what happened to millions of people who depended on their phones for communication, safety, and daily life.

Emergency situations: The most serious impact was on people in genuine emergencies. Accident victims who couldn't call 911. Heart attack patients who couldn't reach hospitals. People being assaulted who couldn't call police. For these people, the outage wasn't just an inconvenience—it was potentially life-threatening.

Fortunately, there's no public record of deaths or serious injuries directly caused by the outage. However, this may simply reflect luck rather than evidence that no one was harmed. Many emergencies went unreported in the public record.

Business disruptions: Small businesses that rely on Verizon were unable to conduct transactions, communicate with customers, or access critical cloud-based systems. A restaurant that couldn't process card payments. A plumber who couldn't receive service calls. An accountant who couldn't access client files.

For businesses operating on thin margins, even a few hours of disruption can mean financial losses that exceed the cost of switching carriers.

Workplace disruptions: Office workers whose computers, phones, and internet all went down simultaneously. Sales teams unable to reach customers. Support teams unable to help clients. Manufacturing facilities that needed to coordinate between locations.

The multiplier effect of workplace disruptions is significant. Not only are workers unable to work, but their inability to communicate cascades through supply chains and customer relationships.

Personal stress and anxiety: For millions of people, the outage created a sense of vulnerability and anxiety. Not being able to reach family members. Not being able to call for help. Not knowing when service would be restored. These psychological effects persist even after service is restored.

Social media posts from customers during the outage reflected increasing frustration as hours passed without resolution. The psychological impact of being suddenly disconnected from the communication infrastructure people have become dependent on shouldn't be underestimated.

Recovery and trust: After the outage was resolved, many customers lost trust in Verizon's reliability. Some switched to other carriers. Others maintained their service but sought additional backup solutions like home internet from a different provider, maintaining a landline, or splitting their family between multiple carriers.

This loss of trust has real consequences for the company. Customers are less likely to recommend Verizon to friends and family. They're more likely to switch when a competitor offers a promotion. And they're more skeptical of Verizon's claims about reliability and investment.

Estimated data suggests around 30 million Verizon customers were affected, with ripple effects on other carriers. Estimated data.

Infrastructure Vulnerabilities: Systemic Risks

The Verizon outage exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in how modern critical infrastructure is designed and maintained. These aren't unique to Verizon—they affect the entire telecommunications industry and society as a whole.

Concentration of infrastructure: Wireless service in the United States is dominated by a small number of carriers. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile together control approximately 95% of the market. When one of these major carriers experiences an outage, there's no backup at the national level.

This is different from other critical infrastructure like electricity, where regional variation allows for some resilience. In telecommunications, a Verizon outage is national because Verizon's network is national.

Single points of failure: Despite redundancy at many levels, telecom networks have critical components that, if they fail, can bring down large portions of the network. These single points of failure exist not because they're necessary, but because they're economically efficient.

Building in additional redundancy costs money. Maintaining additional backup systems costs money. Testing failover procedures costs money. So companies maintain the minimum redundancy required by regulation, which often isn't enough for catastrophic failures.

Aging infrastructure: Parts of the US telecommunications infrastructure are decades old. While they've been updated and maintained, they're based on older architectures that weren't designed with modern network loads in mind.

Verizon's 911 system, for example, still uses some E-911 infrastructure from the 1990s. Upgrading this infrastructure is expensive and technically complex, so progress has been slow.

Speed over safety: In the competition to roll out new services and technologies, companies sometimes deprioritize the stability and safety of existing systems. Features are deployed without sufficient testing. System changes are made without adequate change management.

The underlying economics of competition drive toward this outcome. If Verizon spends extra resources on stability while competitors focus on new features and lower prices, Verizon will lose market share.

Interdependencies: Modern infrastructure is increasingly interdependent. The power grid depends on telecommunications. Hospitals depend on both power and telecommunications. Financial systems depend on all three.

When one critical system fails, it can cascade through other systems that depend on it. A telecommunications outage affects hospitals, which affects the power grid (through loss of demand response), which potentially affects other services.

Lessons for Consumers: Protecting Yourself from Outages

While you can't control whether your carrier experiences an outage, you can take steps to minimize the impact of outages on your life and business.

Dual carrier strategy: Consider maintaining service with two different carriers, or at least having a close friend or family member with a different carrier who can be your backup communication point during outages.

This is especially important if you depend on your phone for work, medical care, or other critical functions. The cost of maintaining two phone lines is far less than the cost of being unable to communicate during a critical situation.

Backup communication methods: Keep a landline at home, even if you don't use it regularly. Landlines are routed through different infrastructure than wireless networks and often work when wireless networks are down.

Alternatively, maintain an internet-based communication method like email that can be accessed from multiple devices and networks. While internet can also fail, it's typically routed through different infrastructure than wireless phones.

Device diversity: Don't rely on a single device for communication. Keep an older simple phone as a backup, or maintain tablets and laptops that can access the internet through different networks (both cellular and Wi-Fi).

Service level awareness: Ask your carrier about their service level agreements and what they guarantee. Don't assume that just because a carrier is large and well-established, they have perfect reliability.

Understand what your carrier will do to compensate you if they experience major outages. Some carriers offer service credits for outages affecting service more than a certain number of minutes. Knowing this can help you understand what recompense you might expect if you experience service disruptions.

Internet backup: Have an alternative internet connection at home, even if it's slower than your primary. Many carriers offer fixed wireless access (5G home internet) as an alternative to traditional broadband. Different carriers use different infrastructure, so if your primary internet goes down, a backup from a different provider could keep you connected.

Business continuity planning: If you depend on wireless service for your business, develop a business continuity plan that includes what you'll do if Verizon or your primary carrier experiences an outage.

This might include having a backup carrier's phone number that customers can call, having payment processing systems that work without real-time internet, or having staff with alternate communication methods.

Monitor outage status: During outages, use websites like Down Detector to monitor outage status and see if the problem is widespread or localized to your area. This information can help you decide whether to wait for service restoration or take alternative action.

The Future of Telecom Resilience: What Needs to Change

The Verizon outage exposed vulnerabilities that the telecommunications industry has known about for years but hasn't adequately addressed. Fixing these issues will require action at multiple levels: technical, regulatory, and business.

Technical improvements: Carriers need to invest in more sophisticated network redundancy, including automatic failover systems that work when primary systems fail. They need to implement better monitoring systems that can detect problems before they cascade into outages.

They need to improve their change management processes, using rolling deployment strategies and extensive testing rather than deploying network changes that could affect the entire nation at once.

Regulatory reform: The FCC should strengthen its requirements for network reliability and interconnection resilience. Currently, the requirements are somewhat vague and penalties for violations are often smaller than the cost of actually meeting the requirements.

The FCC should require carriers to conduct regular failover testing and to disclose the results publicly. This would create competitive pressure for better reliability, as customers would be able to compare carriers' actual performance against published standards.

Industry standards: The telecommunications industry standards bodies should update their standards to account for modern network complexity and the cascading failure risks that large outages create.

Specific standards should be developed for 911 system resilience, ensuring that emergency service isn't disrupted by carrier-level failures.

Infrastructure investment: There's a case for public investment in backup telecommunications infrastructure. Just as the government invested in the interstate highway system as critical infrastructure, it could invest in backup communications networks.

This could take the form of a mesh network that could be activated during major carrier outages, ensuring that emergency services and critical communications could continue even if commercial carriers failed.

Transparency: Carriers should be required to publicly disclose detailed information about major outages: what caused them, how long they lasted, how many customers were affected, and what steps the carrier is taking to prevent similar incidents.

Currently, carriers often minimize disclosure to avoid appearing unreliable. But this opacity prevents both regulators and customers from making informed decisions.

Market solutions: As customer trust in carrier reliability declines following outages like Verizon's, there's market opportunity for alternative solutions. Satellite internet providers like Starlink and traditional internet providers like Comcast could position their services as backups to wireless.

This could naturally lead to more resilient communications infrastructure without requiring government intervention, as customers seek backup connectivity.

5G resilience: The rollout of 5G networks provides an opportunity to build better resilience into the ground up. 5G networks are designed to be more software-defined and flexible than older networks, which allows for better handling of failures and rerouting of traffic.

If carriers design their 5G networks with sufficient redundancy and automatic failover, they could avoid the sorts of network-wide outages that plagued older infrastructure.

Comparative Outage Analysis: What Other Industries Can Teach Us

Telecomm isn't the only industry dealing with massive outages. Other industries have experienced similar scale failures and learned lessons that telecommunications could apply.

Aviation: The airline industry has experienced major outages, most notably Southwest's 2022 meltdown that cancelled thousands of flights. The causes included aging crew scheduling systems, poor data synchronization between systems, and inability to handle holiday surge loads.

The aviation industry's response was to require more investment in system redundancy and modernization. The FCC and airlines worked together to establish standards for preventing future outages.

Banking: Financial systems like payment networks have experienced outages that affected millions of transactions. Major incidents like the 2012 Knight Capital failure ($440 million loss in 45 minutes) demonstrated how software errors can have catastrophic consequences.

The financial industry responded by implementing stricter change management, more extensive testing, and automatic circuit breakers that stop trading if systems behave unexpectedly. The telecommunications industry could adopt similar approaches.

Power grid: The power grid has experienced massive cascading failures, like the 2003 Northeast blackout affecting 55 million people. The root cause was a software bug that prevented operators from being alerted to problems, which cascaded into regional blackouts.

The power industry's response was to invest in better monitoring systems, more sophisticated control systems, and requiring utilities to conduct regular disaster recovery exercises. The telecom industry is currently less mature in these practices.

Social media platforms: Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google have experienced massive outages affecting billions of users and trillions of dollars in economic activity.

These companies have adopted practices like:

• Chaos engineering: deliberately causing failures to test system resilience
• Canary deployments: testing changes on a small percentage of infrastructure before rolling out broadly
• Automatic rollback: systems automatically reverting to previous configurations if metrics indicate a deployment caused problems

These practices are less common in telecommunications but could be adopted to improve reliability.

Looking Back: Historical Telecom Outages and Patterns

The Verizon outage wasn't unprecedented. Analyzing past major telecom outages reveals patterns about how and why they happen.

1990 AT&T network crash: A software bug in a routine database upgrade crashed AT&T's entire national network, affecting 150 million calls over several hours. The cause was eventually traced to a single line of C code with a potential division-by-zero error.

This incident led to significant improvements in AT&T's change management practices and motivated the entire telecom industry to strengthen their safeguards.

2014 Comcast 911 outage: This incident, which we mentioned earlier, occurred in Philadelphia and affected emergency services for several hours. It demonstrated that even cable companies (which use different infrastructure than wireless carriers) can disrupt emergency services.

The FCC investigated and fined Comcast, then worked with the company to implement improvements. Yet the problem persists in other carriers.

2017 Verizon outage: Verizon experienced a significant outage in 2017 that affected customers in several states. This incident was caused by a configuration error in the network, similar to what likely caused the 2024 outage.

The fact that Verizon experienced similar problems again suggests that lessons from the earlier outage may not have been fully implemented.

2019 multiple carrier outages: Both T-Mobile and AT&T experienced significant outages in 2019. These incidents sparked regulatory investigations and calls for industry reform.

Yet despite those investigations and calls for reform, the industry hasn't fundamentally changed how it approaches reliability.

Pattern: Complacency and cost-cutting: Looking at historical outages, a clear pattern emerges: after each major outage, the industry promises improvements, but as time passes and the memory of the outage fades, companies revert to cost-cutting and prioritizing features over reliability.

This isn't malicious—it's simply how competitive markets work. The company that invests most in reliability while competitors cut costs will lose market share unless customers value reliability enough to pay higher prices.

The fundamental problem is that reliability is underpriced in competitive markets. Customers don't pay carriers significantly more for better reliability. So carriers don't invest more in reliability than minimum required.

Business and Economic Impact Analysis

While Verizon hasn't disclosed the full financial impact of the outage, we can estimate it based on industry data and the scale of the incident.

Direct revenue loss: Verizon's annual revenue is approximately

But this is only the most direct impact. Consider:

Service credits: Verizon typically offers service credits to customers affected by major outages. With millions of customers affected and each receiving a $10-20 credit, this could total tens of millions of dollars.

Customer acquisition cost: When customers experience major outages, some switch carriers. The cost to acquire a new customer (through advertising, promotions, and subsidized devices) is typically

Regulatory fines: The FCC may fine Verizon for the outage. FCC fines for major outages typically range from $5-50 million, depending on the severity and whether the company is a repeat offender.

Opportunity cost: Businesses and individuals affected by the outage couldn't conduct transactions, leading to lost business revenue. This impact is diffuse but potentially significant. Studies suggest that each hour of telecommunications outage costs the US economy approximately $40 million in lost productivity.

With millions of people unable to work for several hours, the aggregate economic impact could easily exceed $100 million.

Total impact: Conservative estimates suggest the Verizon outage cost the company and the broader economy somewhere in the range of $200-500 million when direct losses, service credits, regulatory fines, and opportunity costs are combined.

Recommendations for Policymakers

The Verizon outage provides clear evidence that current regulatory and industry approaches to telecommunications reliability aren't adequate. Policymakers should consider the following recommendations:

1. Strengthen FCC enforcement: The FCC should increase fines for major outages and establish a pattern of consistent enforcement. Currently, fines for outages are viewed as manageable costs rather than serious penalties that deter unsafe practices.

Fines should scale based on the number of customers affected and the duration of the outage. A catastrophic outage affecting the entire nation should result in fines exceeding the company's annual profit on a quarterly basis, creating real incentive for improvement.

2. Require public disclosure of reliability metrics: The FCC should require carriers to publicly report reliability metrics, including average outage duration, frequency, and root causes. This would allow customers to compare carriers' actual reliability rather than trusting marketing claims.

3. Establish 911 resilience standards: Specific technical standards should be established for 911 service resilience. These standards should require that emergency services continue to function even during major carrier outages.

4. Fund backup infrastructure: The government should consider funding backup telecommunications infrastructure that could be activated during major outages. This could be implemented as a mesh network of emergency communication systems or as backup routing agreements with multiple carriers.

5. Update E911 systems: The FCC should fund modernization of E911 systems, which in many areas still rely on 1990s technology. Modern 911 systems should be able to route around carrier failures to alternative networks.

6. Establish carrier interconnection resilience standards: Carriers should be required to maintain interconnection capacity and failover systems sufficient to handle major outages at connected carriers. Current standards don't adequately address this scenario.

7. Require change management procedures: Carriers should be required to demonstrate that significant network changes have been tested and rolled out using procedures that prevent network-wide failures.

8. Establish cybersecurity-style incident response requirements: Drawing from the FCC's existing cybersecurity incident reporting requirements, carriers should be required to document and report major outages with detailed technical analysis of root causes and corrective actions.

Conclusion: A Wake-Up Call for Digital Infrastructure

The Verizon outage serves as a stark reminder of how dependent modern society has become on telecommunications infrastructure—and how vulnerable that infrastructure remains.

For several hours on that Wednesday afternoon, millions of Americans discovered that the communication systems they've relied on for decades can simply stop working. People couldn't call their families. Businesses couldn't operate. Emergency services were compromised. The experience was disorienting and concerning.

What's particularly troubling is that this wasn't a one-time event. The telecommunications industry has been experiencing major outages for decades. The 1990 AT&T network crash. The 2014 Comcast 911 outage. The 2019 T-Mobile and AT&T outages. And now the Verizon outage in 2024.

Despite decades of experience with these failures, the industry continues to experience similar incidents. This suggests that market forces alone aren't sufficient to solve the problem.

The root cause is economic: reliability is expensive, and competitive pressure drives companies toward cost-cutting rather than reliability investment. As long as customers don't have clear information about carrier reliability and can't easily switch based on that information, carriers have limited incentive to invest beyond minimum required standards.

Fixing this requires action at multiple levels:

At the carrier level: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and other carriers need to treat reliability as a core business value, not just a compliance requirement. This means investing in better monitoring systems, more sophisticated redundancy, and stronger change management.

At the regulatory level: The FCC needs to establish stronger standards, enforce them consistently, and create meaningful penalties for violations.

At the infrastructure level: The government should consider investing in backup telecommunications infrastructure, similar to how it invested in the interstate highway system.

At the consumer level: Customers need to demand better reliability, switch carriers when performance is poor, and maintain backup communication methods.

The good news is that the technology to prevent outages like the Verizon incident exists. Network engineers know how to build resilient systems. The problem isn't technical—it's economic and regulatory.

The bad news is that fixing the problem requires either market pressure (which hasn't worked despite decades of outages) or regulatory action (which has been insufficient). Without significant change, similar outages will continue to occur, with similar impacts on individuals, businesses, and emergency services.

The Verizon outage was a rare gift in one sense: it provided a clear, dramatic demonstration of the problem when everything is working normally. Policymakers and industry leaders now have an opportunity to act decisively. Whether they will, or whether we'll simply wait for the next major outage before acting again, remains to be seen.

What's clear is that in a nation increasingly dependent on wireless communications—for work, for safety, for emergency services—the current level of reliability is inadequate. Substantial improvement is both necessary and possible. The only question is whether we'll act before the next crisis, or wait until then.

FAQ

What caused the Verizon outage?

Verizon never publicly disclosed the exact cause, but industry experts suggest it was likely a configuration error or software bug in core network infrastructure. The sudden onset of the outage across the entire nation suggests the problem was at the network backbone level rather than a gradual failure. The relatively quick restoration (several hours) suggests the issue was software or configuration-related rather than physical hardware damage.

How many people were affected by the Verizon outage?

Verizon has approximately 150 million wireless subscribers, and the outage affected customers across the entire United States. While exact numbers weren't disclosed, Down Detector showed massive spikes in outage reports nationwide, suggesting millions of customers were impacted. Additionally, AT&T and T-Mobile customers experienced disruptions when trying to reach Verizon customers, expanding the total impact.

Did people's 911 calls fail during the outage?

Yes. Many people attempting to call 911 experienced connection failures. While some phones showed they were in "SOS mode" (allowing emergency-only calls), those calls often didn't connect to emergency dispatch centers. DC's Office of Unified Communications issued a public alert advising residents that if they couldn't reach 911 through Verizon, they should use a different carrier, a landline, or physically go to a police station or fire department.

How long did the Verizon outage last?

The outage began around noon ET and lasted several hours. Service was gradually restored throughout the afternoon and evening. Complete restoration across all regions likely took 4-6 hours from the initial outage. Customers were advised to expect degraded performance for 1-2 hours after service restoration as the network handled unusually high reconnection demand.

Why did the outage affect AT&T and T-Mobile customers?

When Verizon's network failed, it couldn't route calls from other carriers trying to reach Verizon customers. Additionally, the interconnection points between Verizon and other carriers became overwhelmed as traffic attempted to flow between networks without being properly routed. This created a cascading failure where AT&T and T-Mobile couldn't reliably deliver calls and data to Verizon users, even though their own networks were functioning normally.

What can I do to protect myself from future outages?

Consider maintaining service with multiple carriers, keep a landline at home as backup, maintain alternative internet connectivity through a different provider, keep important phone numbers written down outside your phone, and develop a family communication plan for when phone services fail. For businesses, create a business continuity plan that includes what you'll do if your primary carrier experiences an outage.

How likely are future outages?

Very likely. The telecommunications industry has experienced major outages regularly since the 1990s. Current market and regulatory structures haven't adequately incentivized carriers to invest beyond minimum-required redundancy, so similar incidents will probably continue to occur. The only way to significantly reduce outage likelihood is either stronger regulatory enforcement or significant market pressure from customers switching to more reliable carriers.

What fine might Verizon face for the outage?

The FCC can fine carriers for major outages, with typical fines ranging from

Is 5G more reliable than 4G?

5G networks are architecturally designed to be more flexible and resilient than 4G, with better ability to reroute traffic around failures. However, reliability depends on how well carriers implement the technology. Poorly maintained 5G networks could be less reliable than well-maintained 4G networks. The Verizon outage affected both 4G and 5G customers, suggesting the failure was at a level above individual technology types.

Should I switch to a different carrier?

This depends on your priorities. All major carriers have experienced significant outages. Switching carriers provides some redundancy (you can call people who still have service on your original carrier), but won't eliminate your risk of outages entirely. A better strategy is maintaining service with your preferred carrier while keeping backup communication methods through alternative carriers or landlines.

Key Takeaways

• Verizon's outage affected 150 million customers nationwide and compromised 911 emergency services across multiple states
• Emergency calls failed during the outage because backup routing systems and interconnection resilience weren't sufficient for catastrophic failures
• The incident exposed cascading failures where AT&T and T-Mobile customers couldn't reach Verizon users through interconnection infrastructure
• Root cause was likely a configuration error or software bug in core network systems, restored within several hours but affecting millions during the disruption
• Current regulatory and market structures don't adequately incentivize carriers to invest in sufficient redundancy beyond minimum compliance requirements

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