Verizon Outage Jan-14-2026

On Wednesday, January 14 2026 a major US mobile phone service experienced outages. This is as good a reason as any to remind everyone that the Respond and Recover parts of your NIST CSF-compliant policies and procedures work just as well in the aftermath of outages caused human error and disaster as they do against cyber attack. So use them.

Of course you have plans to respond to loss of a service such as mobile phone service; why wouldn't you? Even if you plan is to shrug because you either don't depend on mobile phone service or because you have a readily available alternative.

In my office we shrugged, mostly because we default to making WIFI-based mobile calls and that never stopped working. In fact, we did not even know that there was a problem until someone who was out of the office sent me a text to complain. Were we just lucky, or were we well-prepared? The latter, of course: we embraced WIFI-based calling a while ago in part because of the redundancy.

As it happens, telephony is not a critical service for us, at least not in the span of a few hours. However, we were sympathetic to the people we know who suddenly discovered that they were more dependent on working mobile phone service than they thought.

But this piece is not about telephony, it is about preparedness. One aspect of cybersecurity that is often overlooked is the Response and Recover plans which a good cybersecurity program should include. There is huge overlap between recovering from a cyber attack and recovering from an outage caused by innocent human error or natural disaster. There is some overlap between Systems Administration and cybersecurity Respond and Recover plans. There is huge benefit in having spent the time to think about you will do in the event of interruptions in critical services and systems, regardless of which department owns the responsibility.

This is why Pythia Cyber stresses that up time, as part of authorized access,  is the true goal of cybersecurity. Stopping cyber attacks is, of course, important. Responding and Recovering from outages caused by cyber attacks is important. But don't forget about Responding and Recovering to outages regardless of their source or their cause. Your co-workers will thank you.