When Verizon customers across the country watched their phones slip into “SOS mode,” most people treated it as a temporary inconvenience. It wasn’t a cyberattack, Verizon said, and service was eventually restored. Some customers will receive credits.
That’s good news. But it would be a mistake to treat the episode as benign.
Because what millions of Americans experienced wasn’t simply a disruption in convenience. It was a brief demonstration of how quickly modern society loses its bearings when communication fails — how rapidly confidence collapses into uncertainty when you can’t reach the people you depend on.
I was reminded of that in a way that felt almost embarrassingly personal.
I sat in a dark high school parking lot waiting for my teenage son’s wrestling team to return from an away meet. Earlier in the day he’d told me when the bus would arrive. But once the outage hit, I couldn’t call him, and he couldn’t text me. The meet ran late. The bus had problems. Three hours passed with no information and no backup plan.
He eventually arrived safe, and we drove home. It was more case study than crisis.
It revealed the degree to which Americans have replaced planning with connectivity, and how quickly routine turns into uncertainty when that connectivity disappears.
Mobile networks are for more than casual conversation. We use them for navigation, commerce, authentication, emergency alerts, work coordination and family logistics. The cell network is a backbone system that should be treated like a strategic asset.
The United States has spent years talking about “critical infrastructure,” a term so broad it has become abstract. But critical infrastructure isn’t a slogan. It’s the functional reality that underwrites economic activity and personal safety. Communications networks, GPS timing signals, cloud authentication tools and emergency notification systems may look invisible on ordinary days, but they are the fragile scaffolding of modern life.
Critical infrastructure is fragile because it’s interconnected. It’s fragile because it was designed for efficiency, not resilience. And it’s fragile because most people, including policymakers, treat outages as local, brief and recoverable.
A well-funded adversary would not share that assumption.
In Washington, discussions about cyber threats often focus narrowly on whether a given incident is a “breach.” That is the wrong question. The more important question is whether the American public — and the systems Americans depend on — can function when networks degrade or fail.
If the answer is no, then the mechanism of failure matters less than its effect.
In national security terms, this is what vulnerability looks like. Not necessarily the loss of a single system, but the cascading consequences that follow when society has no redundancy. The Verizon outage didn’t just cut off communications. It forced people into isolation. It created confusion. It increased risk. And it revealed how quickly the public’s ability to coordinate can be impaired by a single point of failure.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Verizon disruption should be viewed as a rehearsal for a more dangerous, intentional scenario.
Iran provides a clear example. The regime has repeatedly restricted internet access during periods of unrest. When citizens protest, the repressive government moves not only to punish bodies in the streets, but to choke off visibility and coordination. Shut down communication, and you slow organization. Cut off the message, and you limit the world’s ability to witness government brutality and control.
In that context, Starlink and other satellite internet services have been portrayed as a kind of anti-censorship silver bullet: connectivity from the sky that authoritarian regimes can’t touch. But recent reporting suggests Iran found ways to disrupt Starlink’s service by exploiting weaknesses on the ground, including using Russian technology to interfere with GPS signals used for positioning and timing.
The details matter less than the implication: no communications system is beyond contest. Even satellite internet can be degraded. Even “censorship-proof” can be jammed. Authoritarian governments adapt, and they do so quickly.
That should not be dismissed as a foreign problem.
In an era where geopolitical conflict increasingly targets critical infrastructure, the ability to disrupt communications at scale, even within the United States, becomes a strategic lever. An adversary does not need to destroy a network permanently to create consequences. A short disruption timed to coincide with a crisis, a disaster, an election or a military contingency can induce confusion and slow response.
And disruption itself can be used as psychological pressure. When people feel blind, they become malleable. When they can’t confirm basic facts, rumors spread. When they can’t coordinate, institutions lose time they may not have.
That is why resilience matters more than attribution.
The question should not be, “Was this an attack?” The question should be, “How do we function when communications fail?”
Part of the answer is national: investment in redundancy, stronger operational security for telecom systems, better incident coordination and hardening of the dependency chain that connects mobile networks to GPS timing, cloud services, and emergency systems.
But part of the answer will appeal to luddites, and requires a cultural shift. Americans need to stop assuming the phone will always work. Families should have basic contingency plans that don’t rely on a single carrier or a single app. Businesses should rehearse outage scenarios the way they rehearse fire drills. Schools and municipalities should have offline failovers for emergency communication.
The Verizon outage was a small shock with a fortunate ending. It offered a useful moment of clarity without a lasting cost. The responsible response is not to laugh it off or demand credits.
Let’s treat it as what it was: a warning.
Eric M. O’Neill is a former FBI operative, national security strategist and bestselling author of “Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime.”