When your phone suddenly flips to SOS in the middle of the workday, it’s a good reminder of how much we lean on a single wireless network. The January 14th Verizon outage didn’t just disrupt texts and calls; it also exposed how fragile connectivity can be when there’s no redundancy or backup plan in place.

Here is a Bluewave Brief of what happened, what Verizon has said so far, and some ideas for building redundancy.

What Happened 

On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, Verizon Wireless experienced a widespread outage that disrupted calling, texting, and data services for customers across the United States for approximately 10 hours. Many users reported their phones were stuck in “SOS” or “no service” instead of normal signal bars.  

Outage tracker Downdetector showed reports starting to spike around midday Eastern, and Verizon confirmed the issues. The impact stretched nationwide, with especially heavy reporting from major metro areas such as New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle.  

Even the response to this outage took a surprisingly modern turn: Krispy Kreme offered free Original Glazed doughnuts from 5–7 p.m. local time, one per customer, explicitly in honor of the phone outage that left tens of thousands in “SOS” mode. 

While Bluewave may not be able to offer you a recovery plan as sweet as Krispy Kreme’s free glazed doughnuts, we can help you build a wireless backup strategy that keeps your business connected when carrier disruptions happen. 

What Verizon Said 

Verizon publicly acknowledged that its wireless network was experiencing an issue affecting both voice and data for some customers across the country. In a statement shared with news outlets and posted on X, Verizon said it was “aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers” and that its engineers were “engaged and working to identify and solve the issue quickly.”  

The company also emphasized that it understood how important reliable connectivity is and apologized for the inconvenience to customers.  

What To Do Next (if this has you rethinking redundancy) 

If today’s outage left your team stranded with C-level leaders offline, sales calls dropped, field techs unable to reach support or in other challenging situations, it’s a good moment to rethink the “single carrier” mindset.

One of the most practical ways to build resilience is a dual-network strategy: 

  • Give critical users access to two different wireless networks instead of one 
  • Use phones that support dual SIM (physical + eSIM or dual eSIM) so both carriers can live on one device 
  • Designate one network as primary and the other as a hot backup for outages and weak-coverage scenarios 

For most IT teams, the challenge isn’t the idea; it’s the operational overhead of managing multiple contracts, rate plans, and portals directly with carriers. That’s where Bluewave and wireless aggregator can come in to: 

  • Bundle multiple carriers under one program 
  • Help you match coverage to your locations, use cases, and SLAs 
  • Simplify provisioning, billing, and support across all those lines 

When you do this well, a dual-network SIM approach can: 

  • Cut down on those “dead in the water” moments for executives, client teams, service techs, and on-call staff 
  • Give you a repeatable policy for who gets redundancy (and why) instead of ad-hoc exceptions 
  • Extend beyond phones to hotspots, tablets, and critical mobile endpoints that your business really can’t afford to have offline 

You can’t stop a national carrier from having a bad day. But you can decide that one carrier’s bad day doesn’t automatically become your bad day too. 

How Bluewave Can Help 

This is exactly the kind of problem Bluewave lives in every day: turning “we rely on one network and hope it works” into a deliberate wireless resilience strategy. 

As a technology advisory and sourcing partner, Bluewave can help you: 

  • Assess where wireless is truly mission-critical in your environment (people, sites, and workflows) 
  • Design a dual-network or multi-carrier mobility strategy using wireless aggregators and carrier programs that fit your footprint 
  • Source and negotiate the right mix of plans and devices, without locking you into a single-vendor corner 
  • Align wireless redundancy with your broader network, SD-WAN/SASE, and business continuity plans 
  • Put clear governance and policies around who gets backup connectivity and how it’s managed over time 

If today’s outage has your leadership team asking, “What’s our plan B when the network goes down?”, that’s a great moment to step back and design something better.  

Bluewave can help you turn this outage from a one-time headache into the push you need to build a more resilient, dual-network future.  

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