Verizon outage warns of looming future danger

Life in America assumes hospitals, businesses, emergency responders and everyday Americans have consistent access to the internet and cell service – until they do not.

An hourslong Verizon outage on Wednesday impacted more than 1.5 million customers’ ability to make calls and use their cell phones, showing how delicate internet and cell access can be. Experts have told USA Today such outages can be dangerous and will continue.

Verizon has not revealed a cause for the outage, but apologized to its customers and said it would be offering credits to everyone who was impacted. The company said it did not have an indication that a cyberattack could be the cause. The disruption lasted nearly 10 hours and left users without access to calling, texting or network internet services.

“Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry. They expect more from us,” Verizon said in a statement.

The widespread outage had a range of impacts. Sports teams encouraged fans to have an offline method of presenting their event tickets at games to avoid delays, while officials warned that the ability to contact 911 could be limited.

Verizon did not immediately reply to a request for more information on Thursday.

Other major outages in recent memory include a Nov. 18, 2025, failure with the company Cloudflare and a 2024 outage with CrowdStrike that led to a “blue screen of death” on Windows systems everywhere from grocery stores to airports.

Though the exact cause of Verizon’s issues are not yet known, outages such as this one can stem from natural disasters or major cybersecurity attacks – or something as simple as a seemingly small glitch in software code that spirals out of control. Experts say these kind of events are part of the modern world.

“We need to treat outages as a routine risk, not a rare event,” said Javad Abed, a cybersecurity expert and assistant professor of information systems and artificial intelligence at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School. “Even the most reliable infrastructure can fail unexpectedly, and recovery is almost never instant.”

Downed systems can be dangerous

Having to print hockey game tickets at home or losing out on purchasing concert tickets because you couldn’t receive a texted two-factor authentication code may seem like relatively small problems, but tech outages can have huge impacts on safety, health care systems and even finances, experts say.

On Wednesday, local governments around the country warned that Verizon customers may not be able to use their cell service to call 911, but said phones would still be able to contact emergency services while in “SOS mode.”

However, 911 operators would not be able to call back if there were a disconnection, the police department in Howard County, Maryland, told residents. The St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana told residents that no, it would not accept 911 calls asking to be patched through to another number.

In July 2024, an outage with cybersecurity company CrowdStrike plunged the country and beyond into chaos, knocking out services at airports, hospitals, grocery stores and more. Flights were grounded, surgeries were postponed and 911 call centers were disrupted.

Jeffrey Tully, an anesthesiology professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a researcher in the health care cybersecurity field, said that tech outages can cause delays in patient care, which cause worse health outcomes. In a hospital, endless systems are reliant on network connections, from electronic health records and radiology systems to scheduling systems for employees. Doctors and nurses today rely on electronic health records to check if a patient is allergic to medications, for example.

“There’s dozens if not hundreds of different applications and systems that you’ll find at the average hospital that is required to execute things in a normal fashion,” Tully said.

In areas with hospitals that have been hit by cyberattacks and lost certain tech functions, Tully said research has shown patients end up doing worse.

The Australian telecommunications company Optus found it made mistakes during a 2025 network upgrade that caused an outage for emergency service phone calls that left hundreds unable to contact police, fire or ambulance services; at least two deaths were blamed on the outage, Reuters reported.

Such outages can also impact daily functions that can quickly become catastrophic if they last for very long. Without access to point-of-sale systems, grocery stores are unable to process transactions. If banking apps are down, people may be unable to pay bills.

They can be caused by natural disasters, such as in Maui in 2023 when wildfires killed more than 100 people and knocked out cell signal, leaving people confused about what to do. They can also be caused by mistakes with software updates, or targeted cyberattacks, experts say. In one inevitable but perhaps far-off scenario, a solar storm could wipe out the internet for weeks.

How you can prepare for tech outage

It is not a matter of if, but when, an outage like the Verizon disruption will strike again, experts say. Next time, it could be much worse or last longer, so it is important to be prepared and not rely totally on internet or cell connection.

Here is what experts say you can do to prepare for cell outages in the future:

• Cash: It is a good idea to have cash on hand in case you cannot use mobile payment options or ATMs are down, James Kendra, co-director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, previously told USA Today.
• Paper copies of important documents: “One of the things that I stress to everybody is to have paper copies of all of your important documents,” Kendra also said. That means a printed out bank statement so you have all your account numbers, a printed insurance statement, phone bill and mortgage or rent documents, so that you have the numbers available you might typically go online to get.
• Landline: If you do not have a landline, you might still be able to use your cell to send SMS text messages or use Wi-Fi to send messages or make calls.
• A radio: This is always a good thing to have to receive emergency updates, but if you do not have one in your home, chances are you do have one in your car, Alyssa Provencio, professor at the University of Central Oklahoma who oversees the disaster management certificate program, previously told USA Today.
• Health care: If you find yourself in a hospital during an outage, it is helpful to know what medications you take and what conditions you have, Tully said.
• Other supplies: Learn more about packing a go-bag and gathering sheltering-in-place supplies.

Companies also shouldn’t rely on one service provider for their most important functions, Abed said. For example, during the Cloudflare outage in November, websites that went down most likely did not have backup internet traffic-routing options already in place. Though it is an additional cost to have backups in place, they can save even more than potential losses if an outage persists, disrupting business or causing mistrust from customers, Abed said.