CrowdStrike Loses the “Hall of Shame” Crown as Verizon Knocks a Million Phones Into SOS Mode

CrowdStrike: No one, and I mean no one will ever top what happened to us back on that Friday in July, 2024…

Verizon: Don’t you dare ever underestimate me again…

If you happened to not get any calls or texts yesterday, it’s likely that nobody likes you… or with all of the budget mobile plans that have just about the same coverage… you still decided to overpay with Verizon (it’s just a joke, calm down).

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about… Yesterday, Verizon decided to run its own live-fire infrastructure drill… the kind where tens of thousands of customers stare at their phones, see “SOS”, and briefly wonder if society has finally collapsed.

Somewhere around noon ET, Verizon users from New York to Dallas watched their bars evaporate like a crypto influencer’s Eric Adam’s credibility. Where customers weren’t able to receive calls, texts, or anything data related. And yes, Verizon is calling it an “outage.” Which is telecom-speak for something went very wrong and we’re not ready to explain it yet.

(Source: New York Post)

Reports started piling up on Downdetector early Wednesday afternoon and never really slowed down. At peak chaos, more than 178,000 reports rolled in during a single 15-minute window. Over the full day, more than 1 million users raised their hands and said some version of: “Hey, my $90/month plan has turned into a brick.”

Most of the complaints fell into two buckets:

-59%: mobile phone failure

-34%: total loss of signal

Phones got stuck in SOS mode. Group chats went silent. And suddenly everyone remembered exactly zero important phone numbers by heart.

When emergency notification systems in Washington, D.C. and New York City start blasting alerts telling residents to borrow someone else’s phone or physically go to a police station, you’ve officially crossed into “this is bad” territory.

New York City’s Office of Emergency Management confirmed it was coordinating with Verizon and other agencies to assess the damage. Translation: this outage was big enough to trigger the grown-ups. One city official summed it up politely by reminding people to have “Plan A, Plan B.” The unspoken Plan C: know a guy on AT&T.

Throughout the day, Verizon dropped a series of updates saying its engineers were “engaged” and “working to identify the issue quickly.” Translation: we know it’s broken, please stop yelling at us on X.

By around 10:30 p.m. ET, Verizon finally declared the outage resolved and encouraged customers to restart their devices… the telecom equivalent of “have you tried turning it off and back on again?” They also issued a full apology tour: “Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry.” Account credits are coming, apparently. (Don’t spend it all in one place.)

(Source: Mashable)

What Verizon did not provide was a root cause, a technical explanation, and any reassurance this won’t happen again. Just a acknowledgment that America’s largest wireless network had a very long, very bad day.

Unsurprisingly, lawmakers noticed. New York State Assembly member Anil Beephan Jr. formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate, citing public safety risks and concerns over infrastructure reliability.

The FCC confirmed it’s aware of the outage and is monitoring the situation (whatever the f*** that means.)

The funniest part to me was watching AT&T and T-Mobile rush to clarify they were operating normally… while adding that their customers might still have trouble reaching Verizon users. Nothing quite reinforces the value of competition like your rival melting down in real time.

I can practically hear Ryan Reynolds warming up his sarcasm voice for a Mint Mobile spot that boils down to, “Still paying Verizon prices? How’d that work out yesterday?”

Somehow, against all odds, the biggest winner here is CrowdStrike, which finally found someone willing to outdo the outage that once grounded what felt like every flight in America for days.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Verizon and AT&T as mentioned in the article.