{"id":179326,"date":"2026-01-17T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/17\/what-caused-verizon-outage-and-should-you-be-worried\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T15:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T20:55:10","slug":"what-caused-verizon-outage-and-should-you-be-worried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/17\/what-caused-verizon-outage-and-should-you-be-worried\/","title":{"rendered":"What Caused Verizon Outage And Should You Be Worried?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Caused Verizon Outage And Should You Be Worried?<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/brobible.com\/culture\/article\/what-caused-verizon-outage-worried-cybersecurity\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-01-17 15:34:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: brobible.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
\n\t\t\t\t\u00a9 Alicia Devine\/Tallahassee Democrat \/ USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesOn Wednesday, January 14, Verizon Wireless users were suddenly left without cell service and data for much of the day. The outage did not affect every customer; however, it did take out service in nearly the entire East Coast.
\nMajor metro areas like New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, and even Chicago and large parts of California and Texas left staring at an \u201cSOS\u201d message where there service bars should have been.
\nThe company has since tried to make things right, offering a $20 credit to users who were inconvenienced by the outage. But what exactly went wrong? And should Verizon customers be worried about another incident in the future or their cybersecurity?
\nVerizon Wireless Outage Likely Caused By A Feature Update Failure
\nThe first thing that Verizon did after service resumed on Wednesday was to reassure customers that the failure did not come down to a cybersecurity threat.
\n\u201cThis was a software issue and we are conducting a full review of what happened. As of now, there is no indication that this was a cybersecurity issue,\u201d the company said in a statement.
\nSo, if not a hack in the security system, then what?
\nRoger Entner of Recon Analytics, a telecommunications research firm, told CNET that the outage likely came down to a failure while trying to launch a feature update.
\n\u201cIt looks like their 5G SA (Standalone) core went down during a minor feature change,\u201d Entner said.
\nSo, what made Entner think this was the case? And why didn\u2019t it affect everyone?
\nThe analyst pointed out that the outage was limited to new high-end devices in specific markets where Verizon uses its 5G SA core. The 5G SA core is a network that uses only 5G technology, rather than a combination of 5G and older 4G LTE infrastructure.
\nIf it were a matter of a failed update, could it happen again?
\n\u201cWhen carriers do massive upgrades, they do that between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in the morning,\u201d Entner said. \u201cA noon start for the crash indicates \u2018fat fingers\u2019 for a smaller change that cascaded through the system.\u201d
\nThat\u2019s to say, a similar outage is unlikely to occur again without human error. But as we\u2019ve seen, it\u2019s clearly not impossible.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Caused Verizon Outage And Should You Be Worried? https:\/\/brobible.com\/culture\/article\/what-caused-verizon-outage-worried-cybersecurity\/ Publish Date: 2026-01-17 15:34:00 Source…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":179327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/brobible.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Verizon.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-179326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179328,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179326\/revisions\/179328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}