Technologies

Why International Travelers Should Consider a Burner Phone Going Into the US

What’s a burner? Here’s how they work and how to get one.

If you’re an international traveler visiting the US, or you’re traveling out of the US and back in, it might be time to consider getting a «burner phone,» a device that doesn’t include all your personal correspondence.

That’s due to increasing reports that agents of US Customs and Border Patrol are scanning mobile devices and, according to some accounts, turning people away or confiscating phones based on free-speech opinions they discover. In one case, a French scientist entering the US for a conference was reportedly detained and denied entry after messages critical of the Trump administration were found on his phone. It’s unclear how widespread these phone searches are or if people are being stopped for other reasons.

Even if you’re not traveling, a burner phone can be quite handy, such as cutting down on unsolicited calls or even to avoid distractions. Busy comedian Conan O’Brien recently praised his burner as a way to not get bogged down in instant messages and notifications.

Although carriers have offered prepaid phones since the ’90s, the term burner phones or «burners» essentially became popular in the 2000s due to its use in the celebrated HBO series The Wire, in which characters used burner phones to avoid getting caught by the police. Although often portrayed as such, burners are not only meant to be used by criminals. With privacy concerns rising, you might consider using a burner phone yourself.

So, what exactly is a burner phone, and how does it work? Below, we explain everything you need to know about burners and how to get one.

What is a burner phone?

Simply put, a burner phone is a cheap prepaid phone with no commitments. It comes with a set number of prepaid call minutes, text messages, or data and is designed to be disposed of after use.

Burners are contract-free, and you can grab them off the counter. They’re called burner phones because you can «burn» them, i.e., trash them after use, and the phone cannot be traced back to you, which makes them appealing to criminals. Burner phones are typically used when you need a phone quickly, without intentions of long-term usage.

Burners are different from getting a regular, contract-bound cellphone plans that require a lot of your information to be on file.

Why should you use a burner phone?

Burner phones are an easy way to avoid pesky cellphone contracts or spam you may be getting on your primary phone number. Burners are not linked to your identity, so you can avoid getting tracked down or contacted if that’s what you need.

However, you don’t have to dispose of it after use — you can just add more minutes and continue using it. Burner phones can still function as regular phones, minus the hassle of getting a phone with a contract.

You can also get a burner phone as a secondary phone for a specific purpose, like having a spare phone number for two-factor authentication texts, for business purposes or to avoid roaming charges while traveling. You can get a burner phone for any privacy reasons you may have.

Read more: The Data Privacy Tips Digital Security Experts Wish You Knew

Burner phones, prepaid phones, smartphones and burner SIMs: What’s the difference?

Burner phones are typically cheap feature phones and usually don’t come with the bells and whistles of a smartphone. Since these are designed to be cheap and disposable, you only get the essentials and very simple designs. The flip phone is a common sight in the burner phone market.

All burner phones are prepaid phones, but not all prepaid phones are burners. What sets a burner apart is that you will not have to give away any personal information to get one, and it won’t be traceable back to you. Also, it will be cheap enough to be trashed after use.

Read more: Best Prepaid Phone of 2025

Prepaid smartphones are generally low-end models to begin with, and burners are the cheapest prepaid phones you can get. However, you can use any unlocked smartphone with prepaid SIM cards if you want to, essentially making it a prepaid phone.

If you want to get a burner, you don’t necessarily have to buy a new phone. You can get a burner SIM and use it with an existing phone as well. Burner SIMs are prepaid SIMs you can get without a contract or giving away personal information.

Where can you buy a burner phone?

Burner phones are available at all the major retail outlets. You can pick them up from Walmart, Target, Best Buy and other big retailers. They’re also often available at convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Rite Aid, local supermarkets, gas stations, and retail phone outlets like Cricket, Metro and others.

You can get a burner phone with cash; a typical burner should cost between $10 and $50. It may cost more if you get more minutes and data with the phone. If you’re getting a burner phone specifically to avoid having the phone traced back to you, it makes sense to pay with cash instead of a credit card.

If you just want a prepaid secondary phone, you can pay for one with a credit card. Credit cards will leave a paper trail that leads back to you, but that shouldn’t be an issue unless you really don’t want the burner phone linked back to you.

There are also many apps that let you get secondary phone numbers, including Google Fi and the Burner app. However, these cannot quite be called burners in the ideal sense, since these providers will typically have at least some of your personal information.

If you’re just looking to get a solid prepaid phone without anonymity, you can check out our full guide for the best prepaid phone plans available currently. We also have a guide for the best cheap phone plans you can get.

Technologies

An AWS Outage Broke the Internet While You Were Sleeping

Reddit, Roblox and Ring are just a tiny fraction of the 1,000-plus sites and services that were affected when Amazon Web Services went down, causing a major internet blackout.

The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.

The outage began shortly after midnight PT, and took Amazon around 3.5 hours to fully resolve. Social networks and streaming services were among the 1,000-plus companies affected, and critical services such as online banking were also taken down. You’ll likely find most sites and services functioning as usual this morning, but some knock-on effects will probably be seen throughout the day.

AWS, a cloud services provider owned by Amazon, props up huge portions of the internet. So when it went down, it took many of the services we know and love with it. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong. The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets.

When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to come to its knees in a matter of minutes.

How widespread was the AWS outage?

Just after midnight PT on October 20, AWS first registered an issue on its service status page, saying it was «investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.» Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue, and within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery.

«The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,» AWS said at 3.35 a.m. PT. The company didn’t respond to request for further comment beyond pointing us back to the AWS health dashboard.

Around the time that AWS says it first began noticing error rates, Downdetector saw reports begin to spike across many online services, including banks, airlines and phone carriers. As AWS resolved the issue, some of these reports saw a drop off, whereas others have yet to return to normal. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues. Reddit finally came back online around 4.30 a.m. PT, according to its status page, which was then verified by us.

In total, Downdetector saw over 6.5 million reports, with 1.4 million coming from the US, 800,000 from the UK and the rest largely spread across Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Over 1,000 companies in total have been affected, Downdetector added.

«This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swathe of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,» Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla’s director of product told CNET. «They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.»

What caused the AWS Outage?

AWS hasn’t shared full details about what caused the internet to fall off a cliff this morning. The likelihood is that now it’s deployed a fix, its next step will be to investigate what went wrong.

So far it’s attributed the outage to a «DNS issue.» DNS stands for the Domain Name System and refers to the service that translates human-readable internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers with websites.

When a DNS error occurs, the translation process cannot take place, interrupting the connection. DNS errors are common are common internet roadblocks, but usually happen on small scale, affecting individual sites or services. But because the use of AWS is so widespread, a DNS error can have equally widespread results.

According to Amazon, the issue is geographically rooted in its US-EAST-1 region, which refers to an area of North Virginia where many of its data centers are based. It’s a significant location for Amazon, as well as many other internet companies, and it props up services spanning the US and Europe.

«The lesson here is resilience,» said Luke Kehoe, industry analyst at Ookla. «Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.»

Was the AWS Outage caused by a cyberattack?

DNS issues can be caused by malicious actors, but there’s no evidence at this stage to say that this is the case for the AWS outage.

Technical faults can, however, pave the way for hackers to look for and exploit vulnerabilities when companies’ backs are turned and defenses are down, according to Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN. «This is a cybersecurity issue as much as a technical one,» he said in a statement. «True online security isn’t only about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.»

In the hours ahead, people should look out for scammers hoping to take advantage of people’s awareness of the outage, added Briedis. You should be extra wary of phishing attacks and emails telling you to change your password to protect your account.

Technologies

A New Bill Aims to Ban Both Adult Content Online and VPN Use. Could It Work?

Michigan representatives just proposed a bill to ban many types of internet content, as well as VPNs that could be used to circumvent it. Here’s what we know.

On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we’ve seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.

The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.

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VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often used as workarounds to avoid similar bans that have passed in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the UK. They can be purchased with subscriptions or downloaded, and are built into some browsers and Wi-Fi routers as well.

But Michigan’s bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state. Associated fines would be up to $500,000.

What the ban could mean for VPNs

Unlike some laws banning access to adult content, this Michigan bill is comprehensive. It applies to all residents of Michigan, adults or children, targets an extensive range of content and includes language that could ban not only VPNs but any method of bypassing internet filters or restrictions.

That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.

Read more: CNET Survey: 47% of Americans Use VPNs for Privacy. That Number Could Rise. Here’s Why

Bills like these could have unintended side effects. John Perrino, senior policy and advocacy expert at the nonprofit Internet Society, mentioned to CNET that adult content laws like this could interfere with what kind of music people can stream, the sexual health forums and articles they can access and even important news involving sexual topics that they may want to read. «Additionally, state age verification laws are difficult for smaller services to comply with, hurting competition and an open internet,» John added.

The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act has not passed the Michigan House of Representatives committee nor been voted on by the Michigan Senate, and it’s not clear how much support the bill currently has beyond the six Republican representatives who have proposed it. As we’ve seen with state legislation in the past, sometimes bills like these can serve as templates for other representatives who may want to propose similar laws in their own states.

Could VPNs still get around bans like these?

That’s a complex question that this bill doesn’t really address. When I asked NordVPN how easy it would be track VPN use, privacy advocate Laura Tyrylyte explained, «From a technical standpoint, ISPs can attempt to distinguish VPN traffic using deep packet inspection, or they can block known VPN IP addresses. However, deploying them effectively requires big investments and ongoing maintenance, making large-scale VPN blocking both costly and complex.»

Also, VPNs have ways around deep packet inspection and other methods. CNET senior editor Moe Long mentioned obfuscation like NordWhisper, a counter to DPI that attempts to make VPN traffic look like normal web traffic so it’s harder to detect.

There are also no-log features offered by many VPNs to guarantee they don’t keep a record of your activity, and no-log audits from third parties like Deloitte that, well, try to guarantee the guarantee. There are even server tricks VPNs can use like RAM-only servers that automatically erase data each time they’re rebooted or shut down.

If you’re seriously concerned about your data privacy, you can look for features like these in a VPN and see if they are right for you. Changes like these, even on the state level, are one reason we pay close attention to how specific VPNs work during our testing, and make sure to recommend the right VPNs for the job, from speedy browsing to privacy while traveling.

Correction, Oct. 9: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how RAM-only servers work. RAM-only servers run on volatile memory and are wiped of data when they are rebooted or shut down.

Technologies

AWS Outage Explained: Why Half the Internet Went Down While You Were Sleeping

Reddit, Roblox and Ring are just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of sites and services that were impacted when Amazon Web Services went down.

The internet kicked off the week the way that many of us often feel like doing: by refusing to go to work. An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable on Monday morning, with sites and services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network and, predictably, Amazon, unavailable for a short period of time.

AWS is a cloud services provider owned by Amazon that props up huge portions of the internet. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong.

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues.