We've all heard the canards about how failure to apply critical patches costs billions and billions of dollars. Maybe, maybe not; it's hard to use that argument in any individual setting. Here's a better argument: Verizon failed to keep its service-level agreements because of outages during Slammer. Those outages were the result of poor patch management, so the Maine public service commission made 'em pay up. The outage period? A day.

In Massachusetts, Verizon tried, but withdrew, a similar attempt to claim that the outage wasn't their fault. In Virginia, VZN was facing an $886,619 payback, but I don't know whether they've had to pay it or not.