T-Mobile quietly makes cold move as loyal customers leave | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

T-Mobile had a rocky 2025. For several months, the company lost a concerning number of customers after implementing price hikes and drastic changes to its phone plans. It also continues to face heightened promotional activity from competitors, making it more challenging to retain and attract customers.

In T-Mobile’s latest earnings report, it revealed that during the third quarter of 2025, its postpaid phone churn (the number of customers who canceled their phone service) reached 0.89%, which is 3 basis points higher than the churn it reported for the same quarter in 2024.

The increased loss in customers comes at a time when more Americans are searching for cheaper phone plan options and are willing to switch phone carriers to save money, according to a survey from WhistleOut last year.

How higher phone bills are impacting Americans:

The average cost of a single-line phone plan is $76 per month.
Also, 42% of T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T customers have seen their phone bills increase in the past year, which is 7% higher than average.
Additionally, 58% of T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T customers are contemplating switching to a different phone carrier as prices go up.
T-Mobile risks losing a combined 75.9 million customers due to high mobile plan pricing. Source: WhistleOut

Amid this growing threat, the company replaced its CEO, Mike Sievert, with Srini Gopalan on Nov. 1. Sievert is now T-Mobile’s vice chair.

A month before taking over as CEO, Gopalan said he plans to roll out a “digital transformation” at T-Mobile to address customer pain points. This reportedly involves making customers solely dependent on its T-Life app to handle upgrades, new lines, and account activations.

“The amount of friction and frustration we cause customers today because of our processes and the state of evolution in this industry is phenomenal,” said Gopalan during an earnings call in October. “We have a huge opportunity to change that with our digital transformation.”

New T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan said he plans to roll out the company’s “digital transformation.”

Helen89/Shutterstock

T-Mobile is quietly conducting more layoffs

As T-Mobile began leaning further into digitalization, it reportedly laid off an unknown number of account executives and sales managers in December and is continuing to cut jobs across several departments.

According to a recent post on TheLayoff.com, T-Mobile allegedly laid off employees in end-user support and resource planning on Jan. 6. It also laid off workers in consumer and retail on Jan 13, and employees in its product department are reportedly being let go on Jan. 20.

Some T-Mobile employees even took to social media platform Reddit to claim that they are seeing additional layoffs in sales and business departments this month.

“Oklahoma here! They cut a bunch out of SMB (small business department) and demoted the rest. They also increased quota while getting rid of resources to even contact potential leads,” wrote a Reddit user on Jan. 18, claiming to be a T-Mobile employee.

“They just laid off a bunch of people in Orlando business sdr team. Like right now just had the meeting,” wrote another Reddit user on Jan. 15, who said the job cuts impacted their spouse’s team at T-Mobile.

“Yes, I can confirm firsthand that there were significant number of layoffs throughout T-mobile for business. It affected Enterprise, midmarket, IOT, ANS, HSI and public sector. This is in addition to the reorganization and significant layoffs that occurred in December 2025,” wrote another Reddit user on Jan. 15.

More Telecom News:

In a statement to TheStreet, T-Mobile said that there have been “some changes” at the company this month, but didn’t share how many employees were laid off.

“Being the Un-carrier has always meant growing in ways that fuel broader products and services, deepen connections with our customers and enable us to respond even faster to a dynamic market,” said T-Mobile.

“As the next step in our evolution, we’re making some changes while continuing to hire to ensure we have the right focus, structure and momentum to keep changing the industry through innovation and our long-standing focus on customers,” it added.

T-Mobile follows a concerning workforce trend

The move from T-Mobile mirrors Verizon’s decision in November to lay off more than 13,000 employees after it lost 7,000 postpaid phone customers during the third quarter of 2025.

In a memo sent to employees that same month, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said the layoffs reflect the company’s goal to “simplify” its operations to better serve its customers.

“As a customer-first culture, we have to align our teams and resources to create new value for customers and build a faster, stronger and more proactive Verizon,” said Schulman. “To do that, we must simplify our operations to address the complexity and friction that slow us down and frustrate our customers.”

Verizon and T-Mobile aren’t the only tech companies rapidly cutting jobs. Layoffs in the tech industry skyrocketed in 2025 as companies nationwide cut costs amid economic uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence, according to recent data from Challenger, Gray, & Christmas.

How many U.S. employers cut jobs in 2025:

In 2025, U.S. employers announced 1,206,374 job cuts, an increase of 58% from the 761,358 announced in 2024.
The technology industry led private-sector job cuts in 2025, with 154,445, an increase of 15% from 133,988 in 2024.
Specifically, in the telecommunications sector, layoffs reached 38,211 in 2025, a whopping 261% increase from the 10,584 the sector conducted the year before. Source: Challenger, Gray, & Christmas

“Technology has been pivoting to both developing and implementing artificial intelligence much more quickly than any other industry,” said Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, in the report. “This coupled with over-hiring over the last decade created a wave of job loss in the industry.”

This trend is likely to continue this year, as more companies across the country plan to explore AI in the workplace. According to a survey from Resume.org in September last year, six in 10 companies said they plan to lay off employees in 2026, while 37% expect to replace roles with AI.

“AI adoption is going to reshape the job market more dramatically over the next 18 to 24 months than we’ve seen in decades,” said Kara Dennison, head of career advising at Resume.org, in a statement.

“We’ll see continued displacement of routine and process-driven roles as well as entirely new categories of work centered on AI oversight, data ethics, prompt engineering, and human-AI collaboration,” she continued.