Verizon Restores Service After Massive Nationwide Outage - September 1, 2025

Define reliable. They're fine until they're not, like all carriers. This weekend proved that all their "99.9% uptime" marketing bullshit means nothing when someone fat-fingers a config push. They spend billions on ads about network quality but still have single points of failure that can brick half the country.

Because redundancy costs money and shareholders hate spending money until everything catches fire. Building truly fault-tolerant distributed systems is hard and expensive. It's cheaper to deal with occasional outages and apologetic press releases than to architect networks that can survive any single component failure.

They all suck in different ways. AT&T fails differently than Verizon fails differently than T-Mobile. It's like choosing which way you want to get fucked over. The real problem is that we have a telecom oligopoly where innovation takes a backseat to profit margins and regulatory capture.

Maybe a $5 credit if you call and complain for 45 minutes. Don't hold your breath for compensation that actually covers the business impact of losing connectivity for 24 hours. Their terms of service probably indemnify them from any real liability anyway.

Verizon blamed a "software issue"

• corporate speak for "someone fucked up a config change and broke everything." Could've been a botched deployment, a cascading failure from an overloaded system, or a BGP routing fuck-up that spread through their network like cancer. They'll never tell you the real root cause because that would expose how fragile their infrastructure actually is.

Because their "technical teams working around the clock" were probably a skeleton weekend crew who had to wake up the one gray-beard engineer who actually understands their legacy systems. Network infrastructure is often held together with duct tape and tribal knowledge. When shit hits the fan, you need the person who wrote that critical script in 2003 and never documented it.

Have backup plans, like Wi-Fi calling, but realize that when infrastructure fails this badly, you're mostly fucked. Keep a landline if you're really paranoid, or invest in a satellite communicator if you're in an area where outages could be life-threatening. The real solution is breaking up the telecom oligopoly, but good luck with that.

Apparently. All that marketing about next-generation networks and blazing fast speeds doesn't mean shit when the software controlling it is still garbage. You can have the most advanced radio technology in the world, but if your control plane is held together with bash scripts and prayer, you're still going to have outages.

People die. That's the uncomfortable reality nobody wants to talk about. When hurricanes hit, when there are mass casualty events, when infrastructure fails

• communication networks become critical for coordinating emergency response. A 24-hour outage during a disaster would be catastrophic, but carriers optimize for profit, not disaster resilience.