The Verizon Outage and the Cost of Concentration
The outage map told the story immediately. Unlike physical infrastructure failures—such as the Colonial Pipeline incident, which clearly impacted a specific region—this disruption stretched coast to coast. The visual looked less like a localized failure and more like a population heat map of the United States.
That difference matters. It highlights just how concentrated and interconnected today’s technology ecosystem has become—and how difficult it is to predict or contain the downstream effects when something breaks.
“Not a Cybersecurity Issue”? Think Again.
Verizon was quick to frame the incident as a software issue, not a cybersecurity one. That distinction may be technically accurate, but it misses a larger point.
“You don’t have to be hacked for it to be a security incident,” Sherri Davidoff said during the Cyberside Chats discussion. “An outage impacts availability—and availability is part of security.”
Availability failures disrupt far more than convenience. They break authentication flows, monitoring systems, and incident response coordination. They prevent people from accessing healthcare portals, receiving multi-factor authentication codes, or even calling emergency services.
Whether the trigger is malicious or accidental, the outcome is the same: loss of access to critical systems. From a security perspective, that’s not a side issue—it’s core risk.
A Single Provider, Nationwide Impact
Large-scale outages like this are no longer rare. Verizon experienced a similar disruption in 2025 tied to eSIM software issues. AT&T suffered a nationwide outage in 2024 that blocked more than 92 million calls, including emergency calls, after a failed network update.
In each case, the root cause differed. The pattern did not.
“What these events put a spotlight on,” Davidoff noted, “is the risk we take by relying on giant pieces of infrastructure that we all assume will always be there.”
Telecommunications providers and cloud platforms have become invisible dependencies. They underpin voice, data, identity, authentication, monitoring, and recovery—but they are often missing from risk registers and third-party inventories precisely because they feel unavoidable.
The Hidden Business Impact of Outages
It’s tempting to frame outages as inconvenience. The reality is far more serious.
Forrester estimates that the Verizon outage could cost as much as $1.5 billion, based on outage duration and subscriber volume. But financial impact is only one dimension.
During the outage:
- Gig workers lost income when navigation, dispatch, and payment systems stopped working.
- Organizations relying on SMS-based MFA were effectively locked out of critical systems.
“It wasn’t just ‘I can’t surf the internet,’” Matt Durrin said. “You lose your communication platform entirely. And for some people, that becomes dangerous.”
These impacts are difficult to quantify precisely—but that doesn’t make them hypothetical. They’re systemic effects of concentrated infrastructure.
Concentration Feels Efficient—Until It Isn’t
Bundling services through a single provider is attractive. It simplifies management, reduces vendor sprawl, and often lowers costs. The same logic drives consolidation in cloud environments.
The problem is that concentration turns small failures into large ones.
“If everything goes through one choke point,” Durrin explained, “and something goes wrong there, you lose access to all of those services at once.”
High uptime percentages can mask this risk. A provider may be available 99.9% of the time—but when the remaining 0.1% hits, the blast radius is enormous.
This is why redundancy and diversification feel expensive right up until the moment they are needed.
Why Availability Failures Become Security Problems
Outages don’t just interrupt operations—they actively create new attack opportunities.
When normal workflows fail, people improvise. They switch to personal email accounts. They share credentials over text. They click links promising outage credits or service restoration. Attackers know this and move quickly.
As Durrin put it, “Anytime there’s confusion or urgency, attackers take advantage of it.”
In the wake of the Verizon outage, phishing campaigns promising fake $20 credits appeared almost immediately. This mirrors patterns seen after major breaches, natural disasters, and geopolitical events.
Availability failures weaken controls at exactly the moment organizations are least prepared to respond.
Lessons for Resilience and Risk Planning
The Verizon outage reinforces several lessons security and IT teams have been hearing for years, but haven’t always operationalized.
1) Diversification matters. Relying on a single carrier, cloud region, or authentication method creates fragile systems. Purposeful diversification—across providers and communication paths—can dramatically reduce outage impact.
2) Outages should trigger security response, not just IT troubleshooting. If authentication, logging, or monitoring is disrupted, security teams need to be involved immediately.
3) Dependencies need to be documented. Telecom and cloud providers are often absent from third-party risk programs because they’re assumed to be unavoidable. That assumption creates blind spots.
4) Incident response plans must assume loss of phones, SMS, and primary cloud access. Tabletop exercises that don’t test those conditions miss a critical failure mode.
LMG Security regularly sees these gaps surface during incident response planning and tabletop exercises, where communication breakdowns are often the first—and most damaging—failure.
Turning Outages Into Improvement Opportunities
Outages like this are disruptive. They’re also clarifying.
They reveal where assumptions have replaced planning, where convenience has replaced resilience, and where single points of failure have quietly crept into critical workflows.
Organizations that treat outages as learning opportunities—reviewing what broke, what nearly broke, and what could break next—are far better positioned for the next disruption, whether it comes from a software update, a misconfiguration, or an attacker.
What to Do Next
If this outage raised uncomfortable questions about your organization’s dependencies, that’s a good thing.
LMG Security helps organizations evaluate resilience through incident response planning, tabletop exercises, and third-party risk assessments designed to surface exactly these kinds of systemic weaknesses. Exploring how your team would respond without SMS, phones, or primary cloud access—before the next outage—can make the difference between disruption and chaos.
Because in a world of shared infrastructure, resilience isn’t about preventing every failure. It’s about making sure one failure doesn’t take everything with it.
