I was sitting alone in a dark high school parking lot when I realized how fragile modern life has become.

Earlier that day, my teenage son told me his wrestling team’s bus was supposed to return from an away meet at 7:30 PM. Parenting logistics aren’t glamorous, but they’re usually predictable.

Then many phones stopped working. My phone flashed the same warning millions of Americans saw: “SOS.”

It felt like we’d been dropped into a world where communication isn’t assumed. I drove to the school anyway to find the gym closed and the parking lot dark and quiet.

At first, I wasn’t worried. The bus was probably running late. In todays’ world of hyperconnectivity, we expect that order will be restored in a heartbeat. But as the minutes passed, the silence took shape in my mind. Did the bus break down? Was he stranded somewhere without a way to reach me?

Years ago, I worked in FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence, sitting quietly in cars in dark places, watching and waiting. Back then, isolation was part of the job. Picking up my son, shouldn’t feel like that. Nor should it remind me how people lived before we attached ourselves to a digital tether.

In the 1980s and 90s, you made a plan, picked a meeting place, and hoped everyone followed through. If someone didn’t show, you waited. If they still didn’t show, you were left with nothing but guesses. Life worked because people planned ahead and accepted that communication could fail.

At some point we stopped planning, because we stopped imagining failure.

Three hours after I arrived, headlights finally cut through the darkness. The wrestling bus rolled in. My son stepped off looking exhausted but fine. The meet ran long. The bus had problems. And once the outage started, he had no way to get the message out.

The disruption was tied to Verizon, which left customers around the country unable to place calls or send texts, pushing phones into SOS mode for hours. Verizon later said it was caused by a software glitch, not a cyberattack, and has provided $20 credits to the two million impacted users. I suspect that explanation will reassure plenty of people. Americans like clean categories.

But when your phone cannot connect, the cause is secondary. A technical failure isolates people just as effectively as an attack. From the perspective of a parent waiting in the dark with no way to reach their child, the difference is academic.

And if a glitch can cut millions of people off from one another in a single evening, it’s worth asking how quickly that vulnerability could become deliberate.

In much of the world, it already is.

While Americans complained about dropped service, citizens in Iran were living through a different kind of blackout. The Iranian government has repeatedly restricted internet access during unrest, cutting communication so people can’t organize and the outside world can’t see the government’s murderous response.

Authoritarian regimes know that repression by silence can be just as effective as shooting protestors in the street. Without communication, protest becomes harder, rescue becomes difficult, and accountability becomes elusive.

For years, one of the few technologies believed capable of punching through that darkness was Starlink, a satellite internet system tied to the idea of censorship-proof connectivity. It promised that a government couldn’t simply flip a switch and cut a nation off, because the connection would come from the sky.

Iran exposed the cracks in that promise. Reports suggest that Iran used Russian technology to disrupt Starlink access by targeting Starlink’s dependence on GPS signals. By interfering with GPS, Iran could degrade or block connectivity in key areas. Starlink responded with updates designed to keep service functioning, but the episode revealed something sobering: the contest over information is an evolving struggle.

When citizens find new ways to communicate, regimes find new ways to silence them. The battlefield shifts from streets to frequencies, from bullets to bandwidth, but the logic is unchanged: control the message, control the population.

That might sound far away from an American phone outage. But the lesson isn’t. Connectivity is now a pillar of safety and freedom. When communication fails, people become vulnerable. When it’s taken away on purpose, control moves quickly to whoever holds the switch.

What can you do?

Start with the simplest step: make a family plan that works without cell service.

Pick a meetup location ahead of time. Somewhere obvious and easy to reach. Agree on what happens if someone can’t be reached by a certain hour. Choose one out-of-state family member everyone can try to contact if local networks are down. And make sure kids know the plan before the next disruption happens.

Because the next time phones flash SOS, you don’t want to improvise.

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At first glance, the posts look harmless: fast money, flexible hours, paid training, no experience required. Payment in crypto. Easy work. Easy wins.

But these aren’t tutoring gigs or customer service jobs.

They’re recruitment ads for ransomware crews and online extortion rings—and many of the people answering them are middle and high school students. Some recruiters even prefer inexperienced teens because they’re easier to control, harder to trace back to the “real” criminals, and willing to do the riskiest tasks: phone calls, impersonation, phishing scripts, and social engineering.

The damage can be huge. Victims lose money, companies get shut down, and real people lose access to services. But for teens, the consequences can be even more personal: federal charges, prison time, a permanent record, and a future that gets wrecked before it even starts.

These groups operate through loose, shifting networks often referred to as “The Com” (short for “The Community”). The pitch is always the same: “It’s just work.” The truth is simpler: it’s crime with onboarding.

Here are 5 steps parents and teens can use to spot the trap before it’s too late:

Bottom line: Teens with tech skills have real opportunities. But talent doesn’t protect you from consequences. The fastest money usually comes with the longest sentence.

About a year ago, the FBI warned Americans to stop relying on ordinary text messages because Chinese hackers were intercepting communications across U.S. mobile networks. That warning still holds. Traditional SMS can be captured in transit, and even newer cross-platform texting (like RCS) still has a security problem: it isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default when iPhone users text Android users (the blue bubble/green bubble problem).

The U.S. government’s advice has been blunt: if you want private communication, use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal or WhatsApp, especially for anything sensitive.

Apple has also cautioned users that RCS messages are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning a third party could potentially read them while they move between devices.

And let’s be honest: people treat the blue bubble like a trust badge and the green bubble like a restraining order. Unfortunately, from a security standpoint, both bubbles can still leak when you cross platforms.

The good news is that a fix may finally be coming. Reports suggest Apple has added encryption-related carrier settings in an iOS 26.3 beta, which could pave the way for fully encrypted cross-platform RCS messaging. But no carriers have enabled it yet.

Bottom line: Until true cross-platform encryption goes live, treat SMS and RCS like postcards: fine for logistics, terrible for secrets.

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