Verizon rolls out AI Connect to safeguard network after major outage

On 14 January 2026 Verizon Wireless experienced a widespread outage that disrupted voice, text and data services for roughly ten hours across major U.S. cities, affecting millions of customers and a large share of businesses. The incident prompted the company to accelerate its AI Connect program, which integrates network transport, edge compute and GPU infrastructure to enable autonomous fault detection and remediation. CEO Daniel Schulman said the new AI models now resolve network issues in minutes rather than hours, and that performance metrics have improved month‑over‑month since the outage. The strategy is aimed at creating new revenue streams while improving service reliability for the carrier’s 146 million U.S. subscribers.