T-Mobile had a difficult 2025. For several months, the company has lost a worrying number of customers after implementing price increases and drastic changes to phone plans. It also continues to face increased promotional activity from competitors, making it more difficult to retain and attract customers.
In T-Mobile’s most recent earnings report, it revealed that during the third quarter of 2025, the postpaid churn rate (the number of customers who canceled their phone service) reached 0.89%, which is 3 basis points higher than the churn rate reported for the same quarter in 2024.
The increased churn comes at a time when more Americans are looking for cheaper phone plan options and are willing to switch carriers to save money, according to a WhistleOut survey last year.
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 grow in the last year, that is 7% higher than the average.
In addition, 58% of T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers are thinking about switching to another phone operator as prices rise.
T-Mobile risk losing a combined 75.9 million customers due to high cell phone plan prices. Source: WhistleOut
Amid this growing threat, the company replaced its CEO, Mike Sievert, with Srini Gopalan on November 1. Sievert is now vice president of T-Mobile.
A month before taking over as CEO, Gopalan said he plans to launch a “digital transformation” at T-Mobile to solve customer problems. This apparently means customers will depend solely on its T-Life app to manage upgrades, new lines and account activations.
“The amount of friction and frustration we’re causing customers today because of our processes and the state of evolution in this industry is phenomenal,” Gopalan said during an October earnings call. “We have a huge opportunity to change that through our digital transformation.”
New T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan said he plans to launch the company’s “digital transformation.”"Helen89/Shutterstock” loading=”eager” height=”540″ width=”960″ class=”yf-lglytj loader”/>
New T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan said he plans to launch the company’s “digital transformation.”Helen89/Shutterstock ·Helen89/Shutterstock
As T-Mobile began to move even more toward digital, it reportedly laid off an unknown number of account executives and sales executives in December and continues to cut jobs across multiple departments.
According to a recent post on TheLayoff.com, T-Mobile reportedly laid off end-user support and resource planning employees on January 6th. It also laid off workers in its consumer and retail sectors on January 13, and employees in its produce department were reportedly let go on January 20.
Some T-Mobile employees even took to the social media platform Reddit to claim that they are seeing additional layoffs this month in sales and business departments.
“Oklahoma here! They cut a bunch of SMBs (small business department) and downgraded the rest. They also raised the quota while draining resources to even contact potential leads,” wrote a Reddit user on Jan. 18, claiming to be a T-Mobile employee.
Related: T-Mobile quietly makes drastic decision after losing customers
“They just laid off a bunch of people from the Orlando business sdr team. Like I just had the meeting,” wrote another Reddit user on Jan. 15, who said the job cuts affected her husband’s team at T-Mobile.
“Yes, I can directly confirm that there has been a significant number of layoffs in T-mobile for business. It has affected Enterprise, midmarket, IOT, ANS, HSI and the public sector. This is in addition to the significant reorganization and layoffs that occurred in December 2025,” another Reddit user wrote on Jan. 15.
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In a statement to TheStreet, T-Mobile said there were “some changes” at the company this month, but did not say how many employees were laid off.
“Being a Un-carrier has always meant growing in ways that power broader products and services, deepen connections with our customers, and allow us to respond even faster to a dynamic marketplace,” T-Mobile said.
“As the next step in our evolution, we are making some changes while continuing to hire to ensure we have the right focus, structure and drive to continue changing the industry through innovation and our long-standing customer focus,” he added.
The move from T-Mobile reflects Verizon’s decision in November to cut more than 13,000 jobs after losing 7,000 postpaid customers during the third quarter of 2025.
In a memo to employees that same month, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said the layoffs reflected the company’s goal to “simplify” operations to better serve its customers.
“As a customer-first culture, we must align our teams and resources to create new value for customers and build a faster, stronger and more proactive Verizon,” Schulman said. “To do that, we need to simplify our operations to address the complexity and friction that slows down and frustrates our customers.”
Verizon and T-Mobile aren’t the only tech companies cutting jobs fast. Tech layoffs are set to soar in 2025 as companies nationwide cut costs amid economic uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence, according to recent data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
In 2025, US employers announced 1,206,374 job cuts, year 58% increase FROM 761,358 announced in 2024.
The technology industry led private sector job cuts in 2025, with 154,445an increase of 15% FROM 133,988 in 2024.
More precisely, there have been layoffs in the telecommunications sector 38,211 in 2025, great 261% increase. FROM 10,584 the sector developed with the previous year. Source: Challenger, Gray and Christmas
“Technology has moved toward both the development and implementation of artificial intelligence far faster than any other industry,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray and Christmas, said in the report. “This, coupled with overemployment over the past decade, has created a wave of job losses 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 Resume.org survey last September, six in 10 companies said they plan to lay off employees in 2026, while 37% expect to replace roles with AI.
“The adoption of AI will reshape the job market more dramatically in the next 18 to 24 months than we’ve seen in decades,” Kara Dennison, head of career advice at Resume.org, said in a statement.
“We will see a continued shift in routine and process-based roles, as well as entirely new categories of work centered around AI oversight, data ethics, agile engineering, and human-AI collaboration,” she continued.
Related: Verizon CEO reveals mistakes that led to more than 13,000 layoffs
This story was originally published by TheStreet on January 21, 2026, where it first appeared in the Retail section. Add TheStreet as a favorite source by clicking here.
