Crisis Reveals Character: What Verizon's Outage Teaches Us About Leadership [25]

Yesterday, Verizon experienced its largest network outage in years. For more than ten hours, millions of customers across the country lost access to voice calls, text messages, and data. Phones displayed "SOS" where signal bars should have been. Emergency management offices in New York City, Washington D.C., and other major metros issued alerts telling residents how to reach 911 if their Verizon service was down.

This was not just a technical failure. It was a leadership communication failure.

The Silence Was Deafening

Throughout the outage, Verizon issued three vague statements, each essentially saying "we're working on it." No explanation of the cause. No timeline for resolution. No acknowledgment of the human impact: people unable to reach elderly parents, small businesses losing sales, patients unable to contact doctors.

When your service is literally the connection between people and emergency responders, you owe your customers more than corporate boilerplate.

The absence of transparency creates a vacuum. And that vacuum gets filled with speculation, frustration, and erosion of trust. By evening, there were calls for an FCC investigation, citing concerns about "the resiliency and reliability of our greater communications infrastructure."

What Purpose-Driven Crisis Leadership Looks Like

I've led organizations through crisis. I've been the CEO who had to stand up and explain what went wrong, what we were doing about it, and what it meant for our customers. It's uncomfortable. It's vulnerable. And it's exactly what leadership requires.

One of my core principles is to Communicate Transparently: be honest about what you see, what you think, and what needs to change, even when it's uncomfortable. This principle doesn't get suspended when things go wrong. It becomes more important.

Here's what purpose-driven crisis communication looks like:

Acknowledge the impact first. Before you explain what happened, acknowledge what your customers are experiencing. They don't care about your engineering teams yet. They care that they couldn't call their kids.

Be honest about what you don't know. "We don't yet know the cause, but we're investigating and will update you within the hour" builds more trust than silence or vague assurances.

Provide a timeline, even if uncertain. "We expect partial restoration within two hours and full service by evening" gives people something to plan around. Uncertainty is tolerable; a void is not.

Take ownership. Not "an issue impacting some customers." Say it plainly: "We failed you today, and here's what we're doing to make it right."

The Real Question

Every organization will face a crisis. The question isn't whether it will happen. The question is whether your response will reflect who you claim to be.

If Verizon's purpose is genuinely about connecting people, that purpose should drive radical transparency when connections fail. If your marketing says you're "the network America relies on," then America deserves to know what happened when that network went dark.

Crisis reveals character. For leaders and organizations alike, it strips away the marketing and the mission statements and shows what's actually underneath.

So, what will your crisis reveal about you and your team?

Be well,

Ron

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Ron Boire is the founder of The Upland Group and a former CEO of Barnes & Noble, Sears Canada, and Brookstone. He works with senior leaders navigating transformation and crisis through his Lead with Purpose™ framework.

© 2025, Ron Boire and The Upland Group LLC. Lead with Purpose™ and The 51% Rule™ are trademarks of Ron Boire.

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