Wireless communications outage For communication systems, there is usually a target minimum rate $R$ bits per second. An outage occurs if the actual rate ever falls below $R$. Since $\frac{1}{2}\text{log}_2(1+\text{SNR})$, sometimes outage is also talked about in terms of $\text{SNR}$ and received signal power needing to be greater than some threshold $P$.

My question is: Say I have a very small packet of five symbols, and during the second symbol I experience an outage. The other four symbols received power was all greater than $P$. Does this mean that my entire packet was unable to be decoded?

EDIT: 

For example, if I use the encoding scheme where: 0 = 00000, 1 = 11111, then I have 1 bit per 5 channel uses. So I can use the formula: $\frac{1}{2}\text{log}_2(1+\text{SNR})=\frac{1}{5}$ bits per channel use, and can solve for the required $\text{SNR}=0.3195$. Does this mean that all five symbols should have $\text{SNR}\geq0.3195$ in order to successfully receive the single bit?
No. It means 1 out of 5 symbols was not able to be decoded. Beyond that it depends on your encoding scheme and criteria for deciding if that packet is usable. For example what if you used an encoding scheme with BPSK symbols such that 1 1 1 1 1 = "1" and -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 = "0"?   (You could replace those with other codes as well 1 1 -1 -1 1 = "1" and -1 -1 1 1 -1 = "0" for example). Typically the packet is longer and error correction encoding is used so that individual symbol errors would not cause the entire packet to be lost.