AT&T Sets A Comically Narrow Definition Of “Service Outage” After Particularly Embarrassing Wireless And 911 Outage
In February 2024, AT&T bungled a network update causing a massive outage that it took AT&T twelve hours to fix. DownDetector lit up with 70,000 problem reports. The outage impacted an estimated 125 million wireless devices, blocked an estimated 92 million phone calls by AT&T customers, and prevented an estimated 25,000 attempts to reach 911.
A several months-long investigation by the FCC found that AT&T hadn’t bothered to test its planned network upgrade before installing it. The FCC’s enforcement bureau had this to say at the time, absolutely none of it good:
“The Bureau finds that the extensive scope and duration of this outage was the result of several factors, all attributable to AT&T Mobility, including a configuration error, a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility’s internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, a lack of controls to mitigate the effects of the outage once it began, and a variety of system issues that prolonged the outage once the configuration error had been remedied.”
Whoops a daisy. Keep in mind this is just one of several recent instances where AT&T (which gets slathered with billions in taxpayer subsidies and is intimately connected to our domestic surveillance systems) has been involved in an ugly 911 outage. The oversight of which AT&T lobbyists have been working tirelessly to dismantle with the help of a Trumplican-stocked court.
Initially, AT&T stated it would immediately be issuing credits to impacted customers “for the average cost of a full day of service,” which isn’t much of anything. But as time has gone on, Ars Technica notes that AT&T has also comically narrowed what it defines as an “outage,” including stating a certain number of towers have to be affected for you to get even a measly credit:
“The “AT&T Guarantee” announced today has caveats that can make it possible for a disruption to not be covered. AT&T says the promised mobile bill credits are “for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.”
The full-day bill credits do not include a prorated amount for the taxes and fees imposed on a monthly bill.”
And of course a lot of your wireless and broadband bill is bloated, bullshit fees (like “regulatory recovery”) that aren’t real taxes, but are just part of the cost of service buried below the line with a new silly name, so your wireless carrier can falsely advertise a lower price.
So not only are AT&T outages a routine thing, your ability to actually get any sort of compensation for them (even in instances where they make be life and death) continue to dwindle. All while AT&T lobbies Trumplicans and their increasingly corporate-loyal court system to dismantle whatever’s left of coherent U.S. federal consumer protection (you know, for “populism” or whatever).
What could possibly go wrong?