Verizon Outage: Why Your Business Needs a Backup Internet Plan

Verizon went down again.

If your business was affected — if your POS stopped processing cards, your team could not access cloud apps, or your phones went silent — you already know what internet downtime costs. If you were not affected this time, consider that a warning shot, not a reason to relax.

Every business that runs on the internet, which is every business, is one outage away from a bad day. Here is what downtime actually costs, and what a real backup plan looks like.

What Happens to Your Business When the Internet Goes Down

It is easy to underestimate how much of your operation depends on a single internet connection until that connection is gone.

A few minutes into an outage, your point-of-sale system stops processing credit cards. Customers walk. Revenue stops.

Within the hour, your team cannot access Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or any cloud-hosted application. Work stops. If your phone system runs over VoIP — and most do — calls stop too.

If you run a restaurant, the ticket system goes dark. If you run a law firm, document management becomes inaccessible. If you run a healthcare practice, scheduling and records access disappear.

The $8,000 per hour figure comes from Gartner's research on SMB downtime costs. It accounts for lost sales, lost productivity, and staff time spent managing the crisis rather than doing actual work. It does not account for the customers who leave and do not come back.

Why Single-ISP Setups Are a Business Risk

Most small businesses have one internet provider. One circuit. One point of failure.

When that provider has a fiber cut, a routing issue, a regional outage, or a planned maintenance window that runs long, your business goes down with it. You have zero leverage and zero recourse in the moment.

This is not a knock on any single carrier. Every ISP has outages. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and local fiber providers all go down. The question is not whether your ISP will fail. The question is whether your business can function when it does.

Three Solutions That Actually Work

Failover LTE

A cellular failover device sits on your network and monitors your primary internet connection. The moment that connection drops, it automatically switches your traffic to a 4G or 5G LTE connection. Your team may notice a brief hiccup. Your business keeps running.

LTE failover is not fast enough for high-bandwidth operations, but it handles payments, email, VoIP, and basic cloud access — which covers most of what you need to keep a small business operational during an outage.

Cost is typically $100 to $200 for the device plus a low monthly data plan. For most businesses, that pays for itself in the first ten minutes of the first outage it prevents.

Dual ISP

Businesses with higher bandwidth requirements or zero tolerance for any degradation should run two independent ISP connections. Not two plans from the same provider — two different providers on different infrastructure.

Dual ISP setups require a router capable of load balancing and automatic failover. When one connection drops, traffic shifts to the other without any manual intervention.

This is the right solution for businesses processing high transaction volumes, running real-time data applications, or operating in verticals where downtime carries compliance risk.

SD-WAN

Software-Defined WAN is the enterprise-grade version of dual ISP. It intelligently routes traffic across multiple connections — cable, fiber, LTE, even satellite — based on real-time performance metrics.

SD-WAN can prioritize latency-sensitive traffic like VoIP across your best-performing connection while routing bulk file transfers over a secondary link. It gives you visibility into the health of every connection and automates failover decisions faster than any manual process.

For businesses with multiple locations — a restaurant group, a law firm with satellite offices, a healthcare practice with multiple clinics — SD-WAN provides consistent performance and management across every site from a single pane of glass.

How Norvet Designs Redundant Networks

Every network we design includes a failover path. We do not deploy a single connection and call it done.

For most small businesses, we pair a primary fiber or cable circuit with a managed LTE failover device and configure automatic switchover with sub-minute detection times. For clients with higher requirements, we architect dual-ISP or SD-WAN solutions based on actual bandwidth, application, and compliance needs.

We also monitor your connections 24/7 through our network operations center. We know your internet went down before you do. In many cases we are already working the problem before anyone on your team notices.

The next Verizon outage will happen. The next AT&T maintenance window will run long. The next fiber cut will take your block offline at 11:45 on a Friday.

None of that has to stop your business.

Contact Norvet MSP at norvetmsp.com to talk about network redundancy for your specific setup. We will size the right solution for your operations and your budget — and we will make sure the next outage is somebody else's problem.