[HN Gopher] Verizon outages reported across U.S.
___________________________________________________________________
Verizon outages reported across U.S.
Author : Scubabear68
Score : 190 points
Date : 2026-01-14 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.firstcoastnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.firstcoastnews.com)
| rcpt wrote:
| Seems like it's happening on the West Coast to
| eob wrote:
| Some outlets reporting T-Mobile and ATT as well.
|
| I assume state on state cyber attacks are commonplace but get
| minimized to avoid public fear.. perhaps this will be the first
| notable one.
| in0v8r wrote:
| The alternative network reports are most likely people trying
| to call Verizon customers and reporting an outage when they
| can't get through.
| eob wrote:
| You think like a person who's debugged large systems failures
| before :). That feels very plausible.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I've seen it happen before - in the big AT&T outage a
| couple years ago reports came in on downdetector of outages
| for other providers.
| mrits wrote:
| T-Mobile is up and Verizon is down in my house
| mosura wrote:
| Estonia was the first major NATO victim of such things
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
|
| Made worse by the fact Estonia is a more networked society
| than, for example, the US.
| swsieber wrote:
| The down detector site has Verizon outage reports two order of
| magnitude bigger, so it doesn't seem like a cyber attack to me.
|
| https://downdetector.com/status/t-mobile/ ~ 1,600
|
| https://downdetector.com/status/att/ ~ 1,500
|
| https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/ ~ peaked at ~169k,
| dropped to 67k
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Grok 4.1 down too: https://status.x.ai/api-us-east-1/INC10b35980
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The US would never purposefully cut of it's own communications,
| right? What would be the tells if that would have happened? And
| what could the average citizen do to be able to communicate
| regardless? Might be useful to always have that knowledge around,
| even if it isn't a personal threat to yourself today.
| fractal618 wrote:
| Didn't they just raid a reporters house. I wonder what service
| provider they used...
| jerlam wrote:
| Sadly this has happened before:
|
| _BART Defends Cutting Off Cell Service In Subway_
|
| https://www.npr.org/2011/08/16/139664637/bart-defends-cuttin...
|
| And will happen again.
| Meekro wrote:
| I think one of the tells might be that all major providers go
| down, not just one.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Get into Meshtastic or Meshcore! (So far I prefer meshtastic)
|
| It's a citizen-run mesh network that allows text communication.
| It's not perfect and not 100% reliable (signal and hops limit
| delivery guarantees) but it's better than 0 ways to communicate
| in this kind of event!
| johnisgood wrote:
| The link just redirects me to
| https://www.youtube.com/c/FirstCoastNews.
| neb_b wrote:
| downdetector is showing a lot of down mobile networks & services
| shredprez wrote:
| Yeah, this is notable. If true, every mobile carrier getting
| hit at the same time says "coordinated incident", from whatever
| source and for whatever purpose.
|
| Edit to say: my Verizon FioS and cell service are both working
| fine, no noticeable interruption at any point today.
|
| Second edit to say: never mind, downdetector's home page
| normalizes report spikes so 1k and 100k both look identical.
| swsieber wrote:
| The down detector site has Verizon outage reports two order of
| magnitude bigger, so it doesn't seem like a cyber attack to me.
| ~60-160k vs ~1.5-1.8k
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| I see multiple posts here speculating on cyberattack--as opposed
| to "we pushed a bad configuration update which messed everything
| up irreparably"--you know, like it has been every other time
| before this.
|
| E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves
| out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian
| telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| That's not true though, sometimes it's inexplicitly DNS too.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| My money is on expired certificate.
|
| If so, successful test.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The great thing is that with all of the encrypted/signed
| DNS thingys, you now have not one, but multiple options to
| combine "invalid certificate" and DNS in one outage. You no
| longer need to choose!
| snorbleck wrote:
| it's _always_ DNS
| zekyl314 wrote:
| or BGP.
| montjoy wrote:
| No no it's gotta be "the database"
| jandrese wrote:
| One of these times they will be right and you will never hear
| the end of the time they were first to recognize the start of a
| cyberattack.
| btreesOfSpring wrote:
| Your post reflects another online observation. With the rise
| of online sports books, this sort of predictive doomerism has
| flooded almost every team's online comment section. It no
| longer feel like fandom or community in the same way. Just
| lots of voices that will be glad to say, "I told you so," in
| the loss and crickets with the W. Wish there was some
| accountability mechanism for all the negative noise
| broadcasted into the channel.
| yifanl wrote:
| In general, whats the expected cost of being loudly,
| obviously, publicly and obnoxiously wrong?
|
| Keep in mind who the President is.
| Bratmon wrote:
| You know what they say about a stopped clock: it's wrong
| 1,438 times a day.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| If it is a quartz watch, it might be 47,120,384 times per
| day.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| better odds than the lottery!
| easterncalculus wrote:
| When telcos get compromised again, the attackers should just
| take it down in service of this moronic fallacy.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-
| cyberat...
| ifwinterco wrote:
| It works both ways, a lot of people also take the "nothing
| ever happens" position and it is true that most of the time
| "nothing ever happens", so by taking that position, they're
| right 99% of the time and sound smart
| sublinear wrote:
| Yes, but the majority opinion is "nothing ever happens" by
| default for everything, not just tech outages. It's not
| about sounding smart, but getting ahead of grifters and
| clout chasers.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| Yep I think it started as a reaction against "it's
| happening!" types and it is a lot less wrong, but it's
| still wrong.
|
| The truth is things do occasionally happen and we should
| be prepared, even if most of the time they don't
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Verizon had issues routing calls to a provider I'm aware of
| yesterday, and had to make some sort of change today to fix it.
| I'm definitely thinking bad configuration update.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It's affecting every mobile carrier (ATT, TMO), not just
| Verizon
| daveguy wrote:
| No, it's affecting Verizon and people on ATT & TMO trying to
| get in touch with the Verizon customers who are affected.
|
| Note the tiny fraction of people reporting for ATT & TMO
| compared to Verizon on DownDetector:
| https://downdetector.com/
|
| (You have to click the links to see actual magnitude because
| the graphs are scaled to show relative outage within a given
| service -- order of 150k for Verizon vs 1.5k for the others.)
| shimman wrote:
| I worked at a major ISP and we had a similar situation where
| the North East went down and the RC was a fiber cut at a major
| node in Philly.
|
| These network topologies are incredibly complex and edges you
| think wouldn't exist have ways of suddenly appearing when
| things go awry.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Cyberattacks are a good scapegoat for any large incompetent
| non-tech company that is unable to admit a mistake. (tech
| companies are more open to admitting actual mistakes - and
| reluctant to disclose cyberattacks even if there actually was
| one - where as non-tech ones would rather allude to an attack
| than admit a mistake)
|
| Cyberattack scenarios pretty much never make sense in case of
| complete outages; if you have the access required to cause such
| an outage it's always more profitable to keep this access and
| use it for covert spying/targeted attacks or save it for later
| than to burn it by causing a massive, visible problem.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| In a dead empire, sufficiently advanced rot is
| indistinguishable from malice.
| Meekro wrote:
| Infrastructure in general seems worse than 20 years ago. Our
| talent for black-bagging dictators has never been stronger,
| though!
| devilbunny wrote:
| 20 years ago much less of the infrastructure of everyday
| life depended on an always-on network connection.
| Smartphones in particular were a relatively niche product.
| I didn't even _have_ a cell phone (and not because I was
| too young), much less expect it to work all the time.
| cheeseprocedure wrote:
| Yeah, the Canadian telco was Rogers. Total recovery took
| multiple days. From the Wikipedia writeup:
|
| > In a letter to the CRTC, Rogers stated that the deletion of a
| routing filter on its distribution routers caused all possible
| routes to the internet to pass through the routers, exceeding
| the capacity of the routers on its core network.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The major Canadian outage was Rogers in 2022:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
|
| I took my kids swimming that day and the pool couldn't take our
| money since the payment terminal was on the Rogers cellular
| network, so it was a free family swim.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Our Comcast DNS keeps going in and out too, not clear if it is
| related or knock on effect or something else entirely.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised you're still using your ISP's DNS when
| there's ton of better free or paid options.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| "You relied on a service you pay for to actually work? What
| are you, stupid?"
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| When that service actively spies on you, then yes, that is
| stupid...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That's... weirdly a thing.
|
| Do you use your car's built in navigation function -- that
| you paid for -- or do you plug your phone in and use its
| free Google Maps or Apple Maps to navigate?
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Yes actually, I happen to save the built in GPS for
| occasions when the phone network is inaccessible.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I didn't pay for any navigation for my car, so I'm not
| sure what your point is? ISPs provide DNS. People
| shouldn't have to fuck with the internet's phone book
| when they plug their modem in (and they haven't for a
| very long time). Maybe we can expect more from the people
| who provide the services society relies on, instead of
| just saying "why don't you just..." every time someone
| has a legitimate complaint about something that ought to
| Just Work.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Many reasons not do use the provided DNS. First, you don't
| want to give the ISP more information on your browsing
| habits than it can already gather otherwise. Second, in
| some countries, ISPs censor websites at the request of of
| the movie and music industries. Those are enough reasons to
| rely on a neutral DNS provider like Quad9 or your own DNS
| server.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Most users don't notice any real differences vs using their
| ISP DNS, and seeing it up and configuring it is yet another
| thing to take time or go wrong.
| relium wrote:
| We had edge delivery issues when I didn't use my ISP's DNS,
| especially from Apple. Not exactly sure of the mechanism, but
| downloading Xcode would take 2 hours instead of 10 minutes.
| syntaxing wrote:
| That's really weird that's the case. DNS simply resolves
| "google.com" to an IP address (8.8.8.8 or something).
| Shouldn't impact anything download related. I'm pretty sure
| DNS isn't used for geolocating either
| noAnswer wrote:
| I wanted to correct you but than I stopped myself because
| I'm not sure if you meant that sarcastically. Because
| with a /s at the end your post makes sense.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Nope, not sarcastic. Would love to know where my
| understanding is incorrect!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Comcast doesn't let you change your DNS unless you run your
| own router. And they also rate limit you if you do.
| charonn0 wrote:
| Pretty sure you can do it at the individual device level,
| in the OS's network settings.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I'm on Comcast with a UniFi cloud gateway max with my DNS
| pointed towards adguard. I have not noticed any rate
| limiting. I actually don't know how they would rate limit
| against DoH.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Might be. VZ does host several big DNS root nodes. But it could
| just be comcast too...
| refulgentis wrote:
| West coast too, down in LA at same time (12 PM EST / 9 AM PST). I
| think they're way way way underselling the # affected
| ("thousands" lol)
| kensai wrote:
| It's Denmark! O_o
| daveguy wrote:
| Verizon acknowledged the issue:
| https://xcancel.com/VerizonNews/status/2011500483072954495
|
| https://downdetector.com/ shows verizon, tmobile, and att. _BUT_
| if you look at the magnitude of the outages for tmobile and att
| vs verizon it 's fractions of a percent. Likely those people with
| tmobile and att reporting when they have trouble communicating
| with verizon customers.
|
| (Note, you have to click on the providers to see absolute
| magnitude -- the graphs are scaled to show relative outage over
| time within a given provider; order of 150k verizon vs 1.5k
| others)
| noncoml wrote:
| > Verizon acknowledged the issue: >
| https://xcancel.com/VerizonNews/status/2011500483072954495
|
| Looking at the replies some of the people who are more worried
| about the outage seem to be the OF models
|
| Not judging or trying to make a point. Just find it interesting
| the ways things are interconnected
| relium wrote:
| >Note, you have to click on the providers to see absolute
| magnitude
|
| I noticed that a little while ago too. Very bad UI. Tempted to
| post in r/dataisugly.
| tantalor wrote:
| Here's a map: https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/map/
| malfist wrote:
| That's a population map
| cormorant wrote:
| It's a population map lacking Dallas for sure ... which might
| mean something real ... but that doesn't match the per-city
| charts they offer. Who knows.
| dylan604 wrote:
| oh, so it's a heat map?
|
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
| kotaKat wrote:
| I've got a Verizon Network Extender and it appears to be online -
| the tunnel is up back to VZW's security gateway, but all of my
| phones are refusing to register to it.
|
| I did manage to roam onto an international network on the boarder
| near me in New York/Canada, so some bits of the core seem
| functional for authentication.
|
| When I roam internationally I appear to be on Telus's 3G network
| (no LTE) for data and voice is falling even further back it looks
| like.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I could see Verizon access points but just couldn't connect to
| any of them. I had no issue sending texts over wifi though.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Parts of the HLR might be unavailable or under a thundering
| herd as all phones are trying to register at once. The HLR
| would also be involved if using EAP-SIM/EAP-AKA so that would
| explain failures on the Wi-Fi access points.
| threecheese wrote:
| Same. Femtocell is online but no clients, phones on SOS mode.
| _nickwhite wrote:
| At 2:14PM EST, Verizon said:
|
| "Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's
| service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are
| focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your
| day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as
| possible."
|
| As someone responsible my whole career for uptime and network
| response, I really feel for the engineers, at the same time
| hoping my service comes back up soon. SOS
| downrightmike wrote:
| Odds are they have a ton of outsourced engineers who are an
| ocean away and unable to do anything.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| At least the shareholders have had an _amazing_ quarter. :)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's very often the case. I bet there are frantic calls
| being made right now (probably using a competing carrier!) to
| Ericsson/etc to come to their rescue, which they happily will
| in exchange for a hefty fee.
| mmooss wrote:
| No ETA yet, not even an underpromised one.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Recently downloaded bitchat so I can contact my family members if
| outages like this happen when we're out and about. I got a few
| T1000 cards for meshtastic but there's just too much friction to
| teach my spouse and others how and when to use it. I wish haloW
| was built into phones which would make long range local
| communication much better.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Does bitchat work during a phone outage? Range on BLE is pretty
| low, right, so I'd expect it to not do much unless you happen
| to live in an area where there are bitchat users every 100 ft
| or so.
|
| I'm in a similar boat to you in wanting a LoRa mesh. I tried
| out MeshCore on the LilyGo T-Deck+ hoping it would be a device
| I could hand out to family members, but I found the hardware
| and software disappointing.[0] But I'm weirdly tempted to try
| the LilyGo Pager.
|
| [0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/#testing-
| th...
| syntaxing wrote:
| Unfortunately as you said, the range is abysmal since it uses
| BLE. It's barely enough for a box store but it's better than
| nothing. I like the idea of the lilygo pager too. I first
| thought it was e-ink from some of the pictures but sadly it
| was not.
| crims0n wrote:
| Really neat concept but that name is so unfortunate. Is it bit-
| chat or bitch-at? Frankly either would work.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Checking off "complains about the name" on my HN bingo card.
| ezfe wrote:
| It's obviously bit chat
| eddyfromtheblok wrote:
| feelin bitch-at, frfr
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I had not heard of it, and the first thing that came to mind
| was bitch-at. Maybe that's a reflection on my character, who
| knows.
| alexzenla wrote:
| Not sure why this says East coast, I am also affected here in
| Seattle.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Weird. My Verizon is working fine in Seattle.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Same in Seattle. Turned of Wifi and the data connection still
| let me online.
| mikeweiss wrote:
| For those who weren't aware: Verizon got a new CEO late last year
| and laid off 15% of the workforce (15,000 people). This included
| people working in network, IT and cyber security.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| Is there a substantive connection?
|
| Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs
| predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline
| "within a month" which...never happened.
|
| It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people
| were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so
| fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from
| thousands of individuals.
|
| You do realize it's possible for an organization to be
| overstaffed?
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This is unrealistic and seems to be biased by some kind of
| broad un-focused hostility. Yes, maybe they were overstaffed.
| But it's reasonable to suspect that leadership overcut, given
| the current climate and the number being 15,000. Your
| characterization of Twitter predictions relies on cherry-
| picking and ignores the actual impacts, and there's no
| evidence that the system goes down without "constant"
| intervention from "thousands". Your tone also implies that
| large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally
| require a lot of maintenance from many people.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| >Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even
| if designed well, don't normally require a lot of
| maintenance from many people.
|
| That's correct.
|
| In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their
| systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point
| of being a security liability, which raises the question:
| if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those
| people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?
| montjoy wrote:
| > many of their systems were running out of date EOL
| software, to the point of being a security liability
|
| This is more likely a management problem rather than a
| staffing problem. Lower level management knows about
| these kind of things but often they are not incentivized
| to make them a priority due to a culture focused on
| growth and "winning".
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded
| startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were
| overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting
| to hit a quarterly target.
| mmooss wrote:
| > the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the
| site would implode and go permanently offline "within a
| month" which...never happened.
|
| Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.
|
| > You do realize it's possible for an organization to be
| overstaffed?
|
| It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed.
| Anything is possible!
| kshacker wrote:
| Slight sarcasm ahead--fair warning.
|
| When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for
| weeks to make sure problems were resolved.
|
| On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new
| boat
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you've got 100k people to run something that _should_ run
| essentially on autopilot, you've got much deeper problems where
| merely laying off selected chunks of people will no longer
| help. The whole company is rotten and the only way is to start
| from scratch and not make the mistakes that led you to
| accumulate 100k people.
|
| I can't even begin to imagine what those 100k people actually
| do. For starters, none of the telcos actually develop their own
| equipment - they buy pre-made from vendors like Ericsson. Often
| that includes ongoing maintenance too. The only "engineering"
| is building the back-office and customer-facing UIs, and even
| _that_ is often outsourced (as a rule of thumb, if something
| can be outsourced, telcos will do it:
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/).
|
| Customer service might be part of that number (assuming that
| too isn't outsourced), but even then 100k feels extreme.
|
| 10k is ok although leaning on the more bloated side. But 100k?
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| Telco infra runs on autopilot?
| johnfn wrote:
| This is really taking the whole "I could build Dropbox in a
| weekend" style comments to a new level.
| drnick1 wrote:
| It's well known that big tech companies are overstaffed.
| You probably can't build Dropbox in a weekend starting
| from scratch, but a smaller scale cloud-based storage
| solution can be deployed very quickly if you start from
| existing open source components. And a small team of
| experienced web devs can certainly build a cloud storage
| thing in a matter of weeks from scratch too.
| mmooss wrote:
| > It's well known that big tech companies are
| overstaffed.
|
| To who? What evidence is there either way?
|
| Is it an often-repeated story online? That sort of
| information is both _well known_ and unreliable - it 's
| well-known misinformation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Almost; you need maintenance and monitoring but that
| doesn't take anywhere near 100k people - assuming they even
| use their own headcount for this instead of just
| outsourcing maintenance to their equipment vendor.
|
| Big Tech companies operate much more complex systems (for
| starters, they actually build greenfield stuff instead of
| buying ready-made equipment from a vendor and plugging it
| in) and have way less headcount.
| tjohns wrote:
| Carrier-level telco is labor intensive.
|
| You're building new cell towers, managing countless
| failed backhual links (thanks to fiber's natural enemy,
| the backhoe), working with whatever obscure bugs your
| MVNOs have managed to uncover, certifying new cell phone
| designs, and still working on upgrading everything to 5G
| while simultaneously planning for 6G (keeping in mind
| that the 5G network architecture looks radically
| different than the LTE architecture). Much of that work
| is necessarily physically distributed across the entire
| country.
|
| Not to mention dealing with end-user sales and support,
| which unfortunately often needs physical stores.
|
| I'm not going to say whether 100k is too many, but
| there's a lot more involved here than just maintenance
| and monitoring - especially if you want your network
| capacity to keep up with growing demand.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| lol. You figured it out, Verizon wireless can just be
| replaced by a UniFi router and ChatGPT.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| ChatGPT can very well be an upgrade compared to the
| "engineering" capability of a lot of telcos (they have
| very little, are hell-bent on outsourcing as much as
| possible and are even _proud_ of that). But don 't take
| it from me, here's a more reliable source:
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-
| room/
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| VZW has 146m lines. Each employee supports 14,600
| customers, seems like a reasonable number...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| It does if you have no idea how it works.
| SoleilAbsolu wrote:
| Erlang fault-tolerance FTW! ;-)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem with being a nationwide ISP - and Verizon runs
| mobile phones, fiber and all kinds of other stuff - is that
| you need _lots_ of hands across the country. A lot of stuff
| can be done remotely and with automation, but often enough
| you still need actual physical hands on site, and you can 't
| just say "eh, we'll come around tomorrow, we can't make it
| there faster".
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Also 'Verizon' is not really one company. It is 2. Telco
| and wireless. Each of those is a mashup of dozens of other
| phone companies VZ gobbled up over the years. With tech
| stacks going back decades. At one point while I worked
| there about 10 years ago they were running the 56k dialup
| for AOL. They also run a decent amount of stores. They are
| not going to automate a retail store in the same way you
| would amazon. You have to have people standing there. Then
| there is the "i need to talk to someone about why my phone
| keeps doing weird things" helpdesks/servicedesks. Then the
| line workers like you point out. Plus the backend people
| who might be able to work from home. But only if they are
| not in a secure area working (they have lots of that). That
| 15k of people was probably the result of several big
| projects that were scaling up but didnt work out. They have
| all sorts of projects to try to 'monetize the last mile
| they own'. Almost all fail.
| adrr wrote:
| Are amazon stores automated? I have Amazon fresh store
| next to me, they have the smart grocery carts that no one
| uses because they are overly finicky. They have same
| number of employees as other grocery stores.
| toss1 wrote:
| Obviously, you know exactly how to run a major telecomm
| operation ten times as efficiently as the dominant operator
| in the most prosperous nation on earth -- you are wasting
| your skills and should absolutely be given funding to disrupt
| them and make Billions!! What is holding you back from
| joining the Oligarchs?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Have you considered that the inefficiency is a feature and
| provides cushy jobs for a lot of people and subcontractors?
| But yes, a modern telco can absolutely be run more
| efficiently if you operate it like a tech company and don't
| have to deal with decades of legacy sludge (whether bloated
| headcounts or heterogenous legacy infrastructure you have
| to support).
|
| The problem is that this is a culture problem and once a
| company is ossified it is really hard to enact such change
| from the inside even if you wanted to because everyone
| enjoys the status quo (and who doesn't wouldn't be there to
| begin with).
|
| Another example: have you seen the UK & EU banking scene
| and the boom of fintech and "neobanks" around 2017 like
| Revolut, Monzo, Starling, N26, etc? They managed to build
| from scratch on relatively shoestring budgets their own
| implementation of a consumer bank, something that their
| legacy competitors _still_ can 't replicate despite having
| way more budget and resources.
|
| Unfortunately, the telco world is an oligopoly and they
| don't like new entrants (banking in the UK was actually a
| much more level playing field in comparison), so we can
| never actually see an experiment that proves or disproves
| my theory.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Have you considered that the inefficiency is a feature
| and provides cushy jobs for a lot of people and
| subcontractors?
|
| Yes, this explains most of our jobs.
| JacoboJacobi wrote:
| Everyone is always so negative about these outages, but if we
| look at the details we see it was a win as long as they
| maintain 85% up time.
| mmooss wrote:
| 15% seems like the magic number. It seems like many
| corporations layoff approximately that fraction of their
| workforce; it's hard to believe it's coincidence.
| downrightmike wrote:
| This is what happens when you invest more in lobbying than the
| network
| Vaslo wrote:
| I have two Verizon phones on very different networks and both
| have not been working well since Tuesday - anyone also having
| this? I kept restarting my phones, airplane mode on/off etc
| adsfsadf wrote:
| good morning sirs
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| i know alot are joking / sarcastic about its a cyber attack- that
| said, Wouldn't it make more sense that whenever there is a "cyber
| attack" its more likely it would only affect one provider? ie,
| each has to have different systems / security postures ect, such
| that a non-public vuln useful to attack Verizon would likely not
| be exploitable/exposed at AT&T (or vise versa)?
| dylan604 wrote:
| why are you saying that this is affecting more than one
| provider?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Lol it's network core. Postpaid users on Verizon branded accounts
| affected. Most MVNO's just fine (checked US Mobile and Visible,
| different cores... and they are working fine on the Verizon
| towers)
| cormorant wrote:
| Further info:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/cellmapper/comments/1qcwj48/observa...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| T-Mobile had this issue 5 years or so ago where the IMS core
| went down due to fiber issues at one of their major backbone
| providers (pretty sure it was zayo).
|
| As I've said elsewhere, never underestimate Verizon's
| incompetence. A couple years ago they shut down vtext service
| which also happened to host their UAprof's for most Android
| phones. Without a working link to these descriptors, those
| devices would download any MMS (pre-RCS picture messages) in
| compatibility mode at the lowest resolution.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I find this kind of odd. Yesterday, 2026-01-13, I - who lives in
| the greater Washington D.C. area - experienced A LOT of Verizon
| disruption. However, today, my service has been excellent. Maybe
| I'm from the future and don't know it. Did anybody else in my
| general area experience outages yesterday?
| gjstein wrote:
| DC local. Total outage this afternoon. SOS on my phone for a
| few hours. Unable to log into my account.
| apitman wrote:
| I got sniped away from Visible (Verizon MVNO) by US Mobile
| (multi-carrier MVNO) during a Black Friday sale. USM has an
| interesting thing where you can actually get a separate eSIM for
| each of the major carriers, and switch between them. I was
| curious so I signed up for all 3. It's been interesting to see
| how the signals vary from location to location, and at least a
| couple times I've been able to get significantly better signal by
| switching.
|
| The main downside is that you have different numbers for each
| eSIM, but that doesn't really affect me because I use Google
| Voice for SMS.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I switched to US Mobile a long time ago just due to pricing. I
| was WFH most days of the week (before Covid) so I could do
| minimal data and pay around $100/yr for unlimited talk/text.
| Now, I do unlimited everything as I commute 5 days each week,
| but it's only $200/yr. Still significant savings.
| peaseagee wrote:
| Unfortunately GV has been having a ~week outage of outgoing MMS
| group messages. Well, let's say a brownout - many messages make
| it through to some recipients.
|
| https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/THtvkD...
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I really love US Mobile. I was a flagship postpaid $90/mo VZW
| customer for a decade and was so hesitant to switch. It's been
| 4 years now, and all I can say is that I can't believe I waited
| so long.
| Meekro wrote:
| I'm considering switching to US Mobile from Verizon-- it seems
| way cheaper, and you can still use the Verizon network. Any
| downsides I should know?
| zamalek wrote:
| I started mid last year and haven't run into any problems.
| Haven't needed to switch off of Dark Star yet.
|
| I was previously on Google Fi, and MVNO roaming is bloody
| fantastic - I always had reception.
| edoceo wrote:
| Ive had many issues where services can't verify the GV phone
| number - cause they know it's GV. Does this still happen?
| ardit33 wrote:
| I am in Miami right now, and verizon is not working here. (I get
| the SOS sign).
| _nickwhite wrote:
| It's also weird that some people here in the office on Verizon
| work fine, and others are on SOS. No correlation between phone
| versions or hardware that I could deduce. I also see the same on
| X: https://x.com/CPTholen/status/2011520566159982758
|
| It came up for around 5-10 minutes at 15:00 EST, but is currently
| still down.
| Meekro wrote:
| My wife and I are on the same Verizon family plan. One of us
| can be down while the other is fine, then 30 minutes later it's
| the opposite. It's been like that all day.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Same here, except that when here (central-western NJ) when
| someone "recovers" here we go from SOS to a few bars but no
| LTE or 5G indicator. Yikes.
| observationist wrote:
| If they're on different phones, they could be on different
| bands, different towers, and different paths, one or more of
| which could be impacted by whatever the underlying problem is.
| iPhone vs Android would be the most blatant tell that something
| like this is at fault, but it could also be different
| configurations from different stores causing them to interact
| with the cellular network in different ways.
|
| Something like a routing configuration, BGP failure, or
| underlying network misconfiguration would cause seemingly
| bizarre results with some phones working and some not with no
| obvious correlation. Compare Access Point Names under Mobile
| Settings on android, and whatever the equivalent is on iPhones,
| and check things like whether 5G allowed and data roaming is
| enabled.
|
| If it's a cyber attack of some sort, then there's all sorts of
| different attack vectors that would cause these outcomes.
| lbcadden3 wrote:
| Phone hasn't had a connection for hours. 5G wireless home is
| fine. Upstate South Carolina.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is what happens when you lay off 30% of your workforce.
| _nickwhite wrote:
| Anyone still using SMS for 2FA codes, here is your official
| notice to change that ASAP.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| if you can!
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I get the sentiment, but at least for me at home, iOS iMessage
| still works fine with Wifi. So it's not impacted, and in fact I
| had to relogin to a client machine with a very persnickety 2FA
| and it had no issues.
| fron wrote:
| Many (most?) services offer a choice between SMS 2FA and no
| 2FA. It's not always so easy.
| matltc wrote:
| Apparently only affecting east coast numbers.
|
| Some server in NJ is down
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