How bad was the Verizon outage? Really bad.

Here's the first thing mobile network experts want you to know when taking stock of the great Verizon service outage of January 2026. It won't be the last — and that being on AT&T or T-Mobile won't make you immune either.

Expecting a modern mobile network to function around the clock, around the year, like water, power or gas utilities, "isn't practically possible," says Octavio Garcia, Forrester analyst and mobile industry veteran. The infrastructure involved (cellphone towers, satellites, and as in Verizon's case, software) "is not immune to unforeseen outages due to multiple causes."

That said, experts also agree: This one was really bad for Verizon, and not just because it prevented an as-yet-untold number of 911 calls.

The outage's only close contender in the worst cell service implosion of the 2020s would be the great AT&T nightmare of Feb. 2024. That one also lasted roughly 11 hours; a later investigation revealed 92 million calls didn't go through, including 25,000 calls to 911.

"This outage does feel like a bigger deal," says Alex Besen, a 30-year veteran of the mobile data industry, now CEO of The Besen Group. "In 2024, many [AT&T] customers had intermittent data and SMS ... this outage took down voice and data simultaneously, and left phones stuck in SOS mode."

Verizon had a 'core failure'

The AT&T outage was eventually traced to one employee running a network update that was wrongly configured. This one, Besen says, was "more of a core failure" — a software issue that so blindsided the company that Verizon couldn't confirm it was dealing with a software issue for the majority of the outage.

We'll have to wait for a full investigation on the Verizon outage to make a full comparison between them. We'll also have to wait to see what role the largest round of layoffs in Verizon's history, which occurred in Nov. 2025, had in this situation.

It's entirely possible that one of those 13,000 former staffers — including at least one Network Engineering project manager — could have held the kind of institutional knowledge crucial to stopping a software-driven outage.

In the meantime, the tale of the tape from Downdetector (where users report outages and which, like Mashable, is owned by Ziff Davis) does suggest the Verizon outage was worse than its AT&T predecessor.

During the Feb. 2024 outage, Downdetector-reported outages from AT&T customers peaked at 74,000 concurrent reports (that is, within the same 15 minute window), but were starting to level off by 9 a.m. ET.

Contrast that with Jan. 14 2026, when Downdetector hit a high of 178,000 concurrent reports from Verizon customers — and that peak came right in the middle of east coast daytime, at 12:45 p.m. ET.

Verizon stores, now in SOS mode

For Verizon, the SOS message was horribly appropriate — and potentially ongoing. As aggrieved customers consider whether $20 is enough compensation, many may follow through on promises to cancel their contracts altogether. SOS might as well stand for "save our stores."

"Verizon will suffer from brand reputation impact and possible customer churn," Forrester analyst Garcia told Mashable. "This is expected to happen during the first six to nine months after the outage."

One way to shorten that churn time: Implement something similar to the AT&T Guarantee, a mobile industry first which launched in Jan. 2025, just under a year after the great AT&T outage. The company now says it delivers automatic compensation: One full free day of service if your wireless goes out for an hour or more.

In the meantime, Verizon and its competitors wait to see how large the exodus will be. And there isn't even a silver lining to be found in Verizon having fewer but happier people to deal with on its service.

"Losing customers would almost certainly hurt Verizon in the short term, even if it slightly reduced network load," says Besen.