On Jan. 14, millions of Americans learned — all at once — that their cell phones can’t be trusted.
For 10 hours, a Verizon outage quietly dismantled the infrastructure of everyday life — no bars, no calls, no texts — and it was not due to an earthquake or a cyberattack, but to a routine software update.
There were no alarms. No warnings or notifications. Just a creeping realization that life works only as long as some remote, complex, invisible web of interconnected systems also does.
All over the country, people sat in their cars, away from home, in the dark, staring at an ominous “SOS” icon instead of the longed-for signal bars. They couldn’t get directions because Google Maps wouldn’t load. They couldn’t call their families to say where they were. They didn’t know whether the problem was their phone, the network, or a missed bill payment.
A mini-crisis like that can be useful — inconvenient rather than catastrophic. It immersed us, just for a moment, in a disaster: face to face with our fragility, when the cost of learning was low. It is a world without illusion, where the things that always work for us suddenly stop working and the people who are always there are gone. It is a place where the normal rules of logic — even basic ones like cause and effect — don’t apply. We must think differently there, our trust in the promises of the normal world must give way to skepticism.
Day in and day out, crisis managers watch weather systems, power grids, and terrorist plots overwhelm even the best-laid plans. One lesson stands out: in complex systems, failure is not the exception — it’s the destination.
Verizon will tell you that it has the most reliable wireless network in the country, winning awards for performance and quality. While crisis managers believe this, it only reinforces their expectation of imminent failure.
Telecommunications networks aren’t just complex; they’re tightly coupled — one failure rapidly cascading into the next. The result isn’t rare or freakish; it’s normal. You can’t debug your way out of systemic risk. Debating probabilities misses the point. The question isn’t whether the system will fail, but when — and how many others will fail with it.
Our cell phones are no longer merely phones. They are our maps, our wallets, our boarding passes, our car keys, our office badges, our proof of identity. They guide us through daily life. But for a few hours they weren’t guiding anything at all.
The mini-crisis revealed how reliant we are on uninterrupted connectivity — and how little margin we have when it disappears. There was no graceful degradation, no partial functionality. Things simply stopped working, and we were caught short.
Cell phones have transformed us into a hyper-connected — and hyper-consolidated — society. What once existed across multiple systems — landlines, radios, paper maps, cash, physical tickets — has collapsed into a single device, on a single network, powered by a single battery. One flap of a butterfly’s wing, and everything stops.
In a permacrisis world, redundancy is everything. Passenger jets have multiple engines. Hospitals have backup generators. Data centers have redundant servers. These systems are designed to fail safely. Our personal lives are designed to fail suddenly.
When Verizon’s network went down the scales dropped from our eyes. These systems are designed for optimization, not for our protection. In terms of resilience, we are on our own. We must stop pondering probabilities and concentrate on consequences. We must abandon the idea that outages are rare and accept that failure is built in.
Resilience starts and ends with redundancy. We must work to eliminate single points of failure.
Start by diversifying beyond a single cellular carrier with backup burner phones or portable hotspots. Loved ones should know the designated meeting point, and maps, tickets, and critical documents should exist offline. Cash is king when payment systems fail. Basic situational awareness — knowing where we are without GPS — is a skill worth keeping. Finally, do the mental exercise: put yourself in that moment of truth and think through how you will not only survive, but thrive.
Jan. 14 was not a catastrophe. It was a preview. The next time the network goes dark, the real question won’t be what went wrong.
It will be what still works.
McKinney is the vice president of emergency management and enterprise resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City and the former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management.
