On January 14th, more than 1.5 million customers were affected by the Verizon outage. The network outage lasted for roughly 10 hours with customers having their phones in SOS mode and businesses having no Internet. For businesses, 10 hours offline means lost revenue, frustrated customers, and halted operations. Atlassian suggests that each minute of downtime can cost $2,300 to $9,000 for an organization.
Following the Verizon outage, they released a statement on X saying, “Today, we let many of our customers down, and for that we are truly sorry,”
How the Verizon Outage Happened
With over a million customers affected by the Verizon outage, one big question is how the outage started. A spokesperson told USA TODAY that the cause of the Verizon outage was due to a software issue.
While network outages involving cell service providers aren’t unheard of, ones of this scale are devastating and lead to massive amounts of business downtime. This outage is still under investigation according to Verizon.
Consequences of The Network Outage
With over a million customers impacted by the network outage, we’ll go over how different businesses and consumers were affected.
What many people noticed immediately was that their phone went into SOS mode. Customers could not text, access the Internet, or place phone calls across the United States. It also impacted 911 calls, as New York alerted that the outage may disrupt emergency services calls.
Not only did the Verizon outage impact customers and potentially public safety, but it also put their brand in the hot seat. On X, Verizon released a statement saying, “we will give you a $20 account credit…this isn’t meant to make up for what happened.” Here’s what one user had to say in response to this statement.
(Photo from X Thread)
Even small-sized businesses, studies indicate that one hour of downtime could cost anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 with some data suggesting it can reach upwards of $100,000. This cost is not including reputational damage that may stem from not being able to do business.
What Businesses Can Learn from the Verizon Outage
The Verizon outage was a stark reminder that even major internet service providers can fail, and no business is immune to unexpected downtime. While organizations can’t control their ISP, they can take actionable steps to prevent or minimize business downtime:
- Incident Response Plans: Having documented procedures for communication, task prioritization, and system access helps employees respond quickly during disruptions.
- Real-Time Network Monitoring: 24/7 continuous monitoring detects issues before they escalate into full business downtime, allowing for faster responses even during off-hours.
- Power Resilience for Critical Systems: Keeping servers, routers, and workstations powered during outages is essential to keep operations running. Battery backups can provide emergency power during a power outage, allowing for critical systems to run and ensuring important data is preserved.
- Automated Alerts and Communication Tools: Immediate notifications of a network outage or system issue help keep employees and clients informed, reducing confusion and maintaining trust.
- Regular Maintenance and Security Updates: Routine system checks, updates, and patching vulnerabilities helps prevent or minimize events that contribute to business downtime.
Understanding these lessons is the first step; the next is putting them into action to ensure your business remains resilient when business downtime occurs.
Build a More Resilient Business
The Verizon outage demonstrates how vulnerable individuals and businesses can be to an unexpected network outage. Even a short period of business downtime can result in lost revenue, disrupted operations, and reputational damage.
Measures such as incident response plans or 24/7 monitoring can be challenging to implement for businesses, so we recommend partnering with a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP). These providers ensure safeguards are in place and professionally managed by a team of experts.
Building resilience is not just about preventing downtime. It is about having a team in place that can respond quickly, protect critical systems, and maintain customer trust.
Tom Kirkham brings more than three decades of software design, network administration, and cybersecurity knowledge to organizations around the country. During his career, Tom has received multiple software design awards and founded other acclaimed technology businesses.
