#outage

Telling us ATT and TMO had an outage today.

Complete sack of lies.

I wonder how many customers ported out today

LOL

Here’s a likely scenario for what caused this outage:
1- Most managers have no expertise or practical experience in the department they’re managing and therefore cannot accurately assess the competency of their direct reports
2- They have experienced people on their teams who go about doing their job quietly because it’s no longer new to them and no longer a big deal so they don’t talk it up
3- They also have newbies who talk up what they’re doing because it’s new and challenging to them
4- RIF time comes and they decide to RIF the quiet experienced person because in their mind the newbie is some superhero who told them how they overcame all the challenges.
5- New challenging work enters the queue but the experienced person is no longer there so it gets assigned to the newbie
6- Oopsie! We have an outage!

As a longtime Verizon engineering employee, today's outage is no surprise to me. In 2024, the company eliminated over 4,800 jobs in a voluntary severance program, followed by another 13,000 jobs involuntarily in 2025. Many of the people who left were senior employees who understood the network and whose jobs were to find and fix problems before they could impact customers. In their place will go an "AI" system that's not yet in place. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to restore normal operations.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/verizon-outage-affecting-175000-customers/story?id=129212330

Verizon outage affecting thousands of customers -- Verizon issued an apology "for the inconvenience.” January 14, 2026, 4:16 PM 🤣🤣🤣

Verizon outage affecting thousands of customers Verizon said it was not immediately clear how long the service would be down. Some Verizon customers were experiencing a service outage on Wednesday afternoon, according to the company.

"We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers," Verizon said in a statement to ABC News. "Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience."

Many Verizon customers said on social media that their phones showed "SOS" in place of network bars.

According to Downdetector, at least 175,000 Verizon customers were affected at one point, but that number has since gone down. Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, said Verizon customers began noticing interrupted service around noon Eastern time.

By 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, the number of Verizon customers affected by the outage was down to less than 60,000, according to Downdetector.

Delighting customers means providing them the service they pay for! Cutting costs is not delighting anyone. Its so embarrassing to try to answer friends and family when they ask what is going on with Verizon. We need our network people!

Krispy Kreme has free 'SOS' doughnuts
Leave it to Krispy Kreme to sweeten a situation. The doughnut chain is giving away free Original Glazed doughnuts from 5-7 p.m. Wednesday night to those who had to deal with "the frustrating 'service outage' today," the company said in a statement sent to USA TODAY. (One free doughnut per customer.)

Krispy Kreme also posted about the outage offer on Instagram and X saying, "because some days need a sweet backup plan you can rely on."

I ported all our lines to Xfinity mobile because it’s cheaper. They use Verizon’s RAN (cell sites and backhaul) but they have their own core. We weren’t impacted by the outage.

Verizon implements a network freeze around the holidays. My educated guess is that they started implementing changes in the core network once the freeze was lifted and something went wrong. Not a good way to start the year!

BAD T1 WIRE WRAP aka SHINER. ENTIRE NETWORK DOWN. KEVIN WILL FIXIT!

First impression, layoffs. Second impression, major outage. FAFO is all I'm going to say.

Massive outage likely resulted from layoffs. Same thing happened with AT&T.

External vendor (they went el cheapo, didn't vet properly, didn't communicate risks, etc..).
Software bug not under their control (they didn't perform a proper FOA).
Hardware failure (what, you mean AI didn't predict it, and could not reroute/resolve it quickly?).
Sabotage (blame it on disgruntled employee).
Other - get creative here :).

We all know VZ leadership will not accept responsibility.

Leaders went around in all-hands saying “things will break” … ok, so the network down is ok? Of course no head will roll in leadership - but way to start off the year with net adds growth is in our performance agreements.

https://nypost.com/2026/01/14/business/verizon-customers-nationwide-left-unable-to-text-and-call-after-massive-network-outage/

Tried contacting customer service via chat. Receiving "cannot process your request" is the response I get to every question I asked, including "I want to increase my plan". Setting the foundation!

What a day. Verizon continues to chase “leaner operations,” yet today’s massive outage tells a different story. When cost-cutting overrides sound engineering and accountability, reliability inevitably suffers.

This will almost certainly drive additional churn. A culture where network decisions are influenced by politics and optics—rather than technical rigor—has consequences, and customers ultimately pay the price.

The long-held perception of Verizon as a “premium” network deserves closer scrutiny. Today’s outage, combined with the recent workforce reductions, exposes a growing gap between branding and reality. Reliability isn’t a marketing slogan—it’s the result of disciplined investment, empowered engineering teams, and accountable leadership.

If this trajectory continues, the market will reach its own conclusion.

Never in my life have experience this. Nationwide outage. Most cels on SOS. Customer service on the phone = useless. The stores are floded w customers concerned. Store employees know nothing.

LMAO. I logged into my account and tried to connect to chat for support. Its completely down. Customers phones dont work and customer service is not available. SET THE FOUNDATION!!!!

Nope.

As part of Verizon’s commitment to delight customers, we’ve implemented a digital detox starting this morning so our customers can get off to a good start in the new year!

I’m confused. According to our leaders, we have the best network. Currently experiencing nationwide outage. Great job! Customers who left will surely come running back!

Setting the foundation!!! Let’s go V Teamers!

Go figureee! After the massive layoffs we can now see the affects! Haaaaha

So this is just classic. They laid a ton of people off and the system that we are all supposed to log into to review our severance and search for jobs isn’t working. I personally know over 35 people that aren’t able to login. We all just keep getting told we’re working on your ticket. This is great, get fired on Tuesday. Told the next steps to look for a job and view your details about your severance is to login and it’s still working and nobody can answer any questions. Class act.

Thanks to ESRO, all Optum tech teams have to adopt a CloudFlare firewall as the entry point to their applications. As such, this company has now become a single point of failure for all of Optum. If they are down, not only is our website down, but all internal and provider facing applications.

Guess which company went down again today for the second time in the past few weeks?

But of course, im "not a team player" and not "aligned with strategic direction" for raising concerns about vendor lock in and huge increases in systemic risk to the company.

As long as you offshore development and onshore cheap labor you are going to continue to have outages.

If everything crashes again on Thursday, I swear my heart is going to give out from the stress, because with the total lack of real communication from leadership, this place is the only spot where I can even try to figure out what’s going on. I’m begging the universe not to let this fall apart on D-day, because losing this one source of updates would push the anxiety into a whole different level.

A 15-hour (!) outage wiping out $1.1B, because spreadsheet pushers and senior management became dominated by folks that knew almost nothing about how AWS worked. Classy! Keep those layoffs coming!

To read anything, I have to hit the stop button before the page finishes its task. It's turned to absolute garbage.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/ibm_cloud_experiencing_quantum_computer/

Remember what CEO AK said, quantum is the next "AI"... whatever that means!

I swear to whoever the creator is these execs are d-mb as he-l. Buying cheap platforms for a big a-s org like UHC and the companies it’s bought out plus offshoring to overseas third world countries results in so many tech issues and SD and upper management want to act surprised systems are down.

good luck accessing anything this month..

Any team that is in Azure is reporting 100% impact. All regions. Azure support helpless on the call. During peak season!

Man, sure am glad we decommissioned Chaska and Elk River and mandated the company go 100x to the cloud!!! What could go wrong?

What a disaster.

Did anyone else lose access to Slack tonight? I was logged out and can’t log back in

Like crowdstrike outage last year, similar issues with Amazon AWS.

Poor programmers in India

VPN went out awhile back — word is Charlotte teammates working from home and the “permanent” telecommuters decided to come into the office with their kids in tow (because who needs childcare when you’ve got badge access, right?).

Naturally, it turned into a full-blown security circus

Big thanks to leadership for taking the lesson to heart and rewarding us with a 5-day-a-week RTO in January. Appreciate y’all alpaca-ing us back to the office.

About 10 years ago we launched 2 new data centers. When JF took over as a CEO, I heard someone in IT saying JF wants everything to go to external cloud.

In light of today’s AWS outage, what do IT people think of JF’s view and the danger of external cloud service?

Are we still using the 2 data centers?

I'm kind of thinking it happens soon. Oracle is laid off so many talented smart people, they've terrified the remaining people with talk about how AI is going to replace them or they're going to get laid off, and they're driving away any kind of decent talent from ever applying...

it turns out being a greedy psychopath a--hole id--t is really expensive

Comcast has a cyber attack today. All 6 petabytes of minio data was deleted. People are checking if it was retaliation for the divisions layoffs.

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and remote start is dead for all cars which have it.

who needs redundant systems?

Along with Microsoft, Delta and others who rely on Bezos the Bozo for connectivity, T-Mobile is suffering with this AWS outage. There's quite a number of services in industry and government that rely on this backbone.

So glad T-Mobile outsourced a bunch of its connectivity. They can just point at Bozos.