T-Mobile quietly makes cold move as loyal customers leave

T-Mobile has had a rough 2025. The company has lost a large number of customers over the past few months after implementing price increases and drastic changes to mobile phone plans. It also continues to face pressure from competitors to step up promotions, making it more difficult to retain and attract customers.

T-Mobile’s latest financial report shows that in the third quarter of 2025, its postpaid phone churn rate (the number of customers who canceled their phone service) reached 0.89%, 3 basis points higher than its reported churn rate in the same quarter of 2024.

A WhistleOut survey last year showed that churn is increasing as more Americans are looking for cheaper cell phone plan options and are willing to switch cell phone carriers to save money.

• The average cost of a single-line phone plan is $76 per month.

• return, 42% of T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers have checked their phone bills Increase In the past year, that is 7% high Above average.

• also, 58% T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers Consider switching As prices increase, move to a different phone carrier.

• T-Mobile risk losing a combined 75.9 million customers Because mobile plans are priced higher.
  Source: WhistleOut

Faced with the growing threat, the company replaced CEO Mike Sievert with Srini Gopalan on November 1. Sievert is now vice chairman of T-Mobile.

A month before taking over as CEO, Gopalan said he planned to launch a “digital transformation” at T-Mobile to address customer pain points. This reportedly involves making customers completely reliant on their T-Life app to handle upgrades, new lines and account activation.

“The friction and frustration we are causing our customers today because of our processes and the state of the industry is staggering,” Gopalan said on an earnings call in October. “We have a huge opportunity to change that through digital transformation.”

T-Mobile’s new CEO Srini Gopalan says he plans to roll out the company’s “digital transformation.”"Helen89/Shutterstock” loading=”eager” height=”540″ width=”960″ class=”yf-lglytj loader”/>

T-Mobile reportedly laid off an unknown number of account executives and sales managers in December and continues to cut staff across multiple departments as it begins its further digital transformation.

T-Mobile allegedly laid off employees in its end-user support and resource planning departments on January 6, according to a recent post on TheLayoff.com. The company also laid off employees in its consumer and retail divisions on January 13, and employees in its products division will reportedly be laid off on January 20.

Some T-Mobile employees even took to the social media platform Reddit to claim that further layoffs will occur in sales and business units this month.

“This is Oklahoma! They cut a bunch of people from the SMB (Small Business Sector) and demoted the rest. They also increased quotas while giving up resources to contact potential leads,” a Reddit user who claimed to be a T-Mobile employee wrote on January 18.

RELATED: T-Mobile quietly makes big decision after losing customers

“They just laid off some people from the SDR team in the Orlando business. Like just coming out of a meeting right now,” another Reddit user wrote on January 15. He said the layoffs affected his spouse’s team at T-Mobile.

Another Reddit user wrote on January 15: “Yes, I can confirm first hand that there are massive layoffs across T-mobile’s business units. This affects Enterprise, Mid-Market, IoT, ANS, HSI and Public Sector. This does not include the restructuring and massive layoffs that will occur in December 2025.”

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T-Mobile said in a statement to TheStreet that the company has made “some changes” this month but did not disclose how many employees were laid off.

“Becoming a non-carrier has always meant growing in a way that drives a broader range of products and services, deepens our connections with customers and allows us to respond more quickly to dynamic markets,” T-Mobile said.

It added: “As the next step in our evolution, we are making a number of changes while continuing to recruit to ensure we have the right focus, structure and drive to continue changing the industry through innovation and our long-standing focus on customers.”

T-Mobile’s move echoes Verizon’s decision in November to lay off more than 13,000 employees after losing 7,000 postpaid phone customers in the third quarter of 2025.

In a memo sent to employees that same month, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said the layoffs reflected the company’s goal to “simplify” operations to better serve 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 this, we must streamline operations to address the complexity and friction that slows us down and frustrates customers.”

Verizon and T-Mobile aren’t the only tech companies cutting jobs quickly. New data from Challenger, Grey, and Christmas shows layoffs in the tech industry are surging in 2025 as companies across the country cut costs amid economic uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence.

• In 2025, U.S. employers announced 1,206,374 layoffs, increased by 58% from 761,358 Announced in 2024.

• Tech industry to lead private sector job cuts in 2025, with 154,445increased 15% from 133,988 2024.

• Specifically, in the telecommunications sector, the number of layoffs reached 38,211 By 2025, a huge increased by 261% from 10,584 The department had done so the previous year.
  Source: Challenger, Gray and Christmas

“Technology is shifting to developing and implementing artificial intelligence faster than any other industry,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray and Christmas, said in the report. “This, coupled with over-hiring 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 artificial intelligence in the workplace. According to a Resume.org survey last September, six in 10 companies said they planned to lay off employees in 2026, while 37% expected to replace jobs with artificial intelligence.

“The adoption of artificial intelligence will reshape the job market in unprecedented ways over the next 18 to 24 months,” Kara Dennison, director of career counseling at Resume.org, said in a statement.

She continued: “We will see routine and process-driven roles continue to be replaced, as well as entirely new job categories centered around AI oversight, data ethics, just-in-time engineering and human-machine collaboration.”

RELATED: Verizon CEO reveals mistakes that led to more than 13,000 layoffs

This article was originally published by TheStreet on January 21, 2026, and first appeared in the Retail section. Click here to add TheStreet as your preferred source.