When One Update Breaks a Nation: What the Verizon Outage Teaches Us About Change Management On January 14, 2026, millions of Verizon customers across the United States suddenly lost mobile voice, text, and data capabilities. Phones displayed SOS‑only mode, businesses were knocked offline, 911 access warnings were issued in major cities, and over 1.5 to 2 million outage reports were logged throughout the day. By late evening, Verizon confirmed the outage was caused by a softwa