Verizon is entering reset mode as its new chief, Dan Schulman, unveils plans to eliminate over 13,000 roles – one of the largest workforce reductions the company has ever undertaken, and among the largest in the US in recent times. After years of uneven subscriber growth and mounting pressure from cut-rate competitors, CEO Dan Schulman is launching a restructuring aimed at simplifying how Verizon operates, reducing spending, and sharpening the companyâs competitiveness.
In a bid to offload operating costs and shrink the number of employees directly on its payroll, the telco giant also plans to shift 179 of its corporate-owned stores into franchised locations. Only one store will be shut down entirely, but the franchising shift is expected to account for a significant share of the job cuts. Verizon maintains that franchise operators can run locations more efficiently while still preserving the companyâs footprint in local markets. Just a week earlier, reports surfaced that Verizon was preparing to cut roughly 10-15% of its 100,000-person workforce – a move that now appears to be materialising.
The company is pairing the cuts with a dedicated transition fund, giving displaced employees access to retraining programs and potential reassignments. Importantly, the firm has consistently framed the layoffs as a cost and structural issue, not a wave of automation replacing human roles. It stressed that while AI and digital tools are becoming increasingly important across the telecom industry, the cuts are being driven by the need to streamline, not by the adoption of new technologies.
Verizonâs current challenges arise partly from its slowdown in customer growth. The company has logged only modest subscriber gains while rivals like AT&T and T-Mobile continue to pull in users with aggressive trade-in deals and lower-priced plans. The pressure became even clearer in Verizonâs third quarter of 2025, when it reported a net loss of 7,000 wireless retail postpaid phone customers – a sharp turn from the 18,000 it added during the same period a year earlier.
Verizon is carrying an estimated $143 billion in net debt as of mid-2025. At the same time, the company has been managing heavy financial obligations, having spent large amounts on 5G spectrum and major acquisitions (including its about $20 billion purchase of Frontier Communications Corporation) to strengthen its long-term network plans. It is also worth noting that, in his internal message, CEO Schulman described Verizon as overly complex, weighed down by layers of internal processes that slow the company and inflate its costs.
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