AT&T and Verizon cut about 8,000 jobs in third quarter

AT&T and Verizon together cut about 8,000 jobs in the third quarter of 2026, according to Light Reading’s tally, and the two carriers now employ fewer people combined than AT&T alone did in 2020. ¹ The people affected are the carriers’ own employees and, in Verizon’s case, outside contractors. Customers see no bill change from any of this.

A note on the numbers, since several are floating around. The 8,000 is the two companies’ combined total for one quarter. ¹ It is separate from AT&T’s 8,000-person cut over all of last year, and from Verizon’s announcement last November that it would lay off more than 13,000 workers, about 13 percent of its roughly 100,000 full-time staff. ²³ Same round number, different periods. Read the fine print before you add them up.

Here is the long view. AT&T had 247,800 workers at the end of 2019 and 140,990 at the end of 2024, a drop of 106,810. ⁴ It employed nearly 131,000 as of June, and cut about 2,100 jobs in the first half of 2026. ² Verizon lost 35,400 workers over the 2019 to 2024 stretch. ⁴

One figure is unconfirmed. A person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told WIRED that AT&T’s internal target is a workforce near 85,000 by 2030. AT&T called that number inaccurate. ² Treat it as a rumor. What AT&T’s CTO did say on the record is that headcount in five years will not match today’s. ²

Now the claim that needs the biggest asterisk. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman told analysts there could be at least 100 billion software agents in the world against about 8.5 billion people. ¹ In April he told The Wall Street Journal that AI could push unemployment to 30 percent within two to five years. ¹ Light Reading notes that if he were right, the rate should already be creeping up, and that the cuts at these two carriers so far seem to have had little to do with AI. ¹ That forecast sits in the footnotes of this story with nothing underneath it.

So what is driving the cuts? Analysts quoted by Fierce Network point to efficiency in general: automation, better network reliability that means fewer repair visits, a shift from stores to digital sales, and outsourcing. ⁴ A union research director said wireline technicians and call center workers have seen cuts of 30 to 60 percent over the past decade. ⁴ Verizon’s own memo promised to “significantly reduce” outsourced labor spending and set up a $20 million reskilling fund for departing staff. ³

AT&T is doing use AI in places: customer service, tower siting, maintenance spotting and code generation. It also plans to swap physical hardware at thousands of hubs for cloud software next year, which could thin out some middle management and junior developer roles. ² That is expected, not yet done.

Asterisk count: zero conditions on this one, because nobody is selling a plan. The one big asterisk belongs to the AI story: the reporting finds little link between AI and the cuts so far.

Who this is for: current and former carrier staff, contractors, and anyone who wonders why support lines feel thinner each year.

Our read: The headline number is real, but the AI explanation is mostly a forecast, not an outcome. The older, duller causes look like they are doing the work. Watch whether AT&T’s cloud network swap next year changes that.

Footnotes

1. Light Reading, “AT&T and Verizon normalize layoffs as 8,000 jobs go in a quarter”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. WIRED, “AT&T Is Automating Away Jobs—and Its Old Telecom Empire”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. The Verge, “Verizon is laying off over 13,000 workers”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩²

4. Fierce Network, “All in the charts: Analyzing telecom’s big workforce shrinkage”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴