It’s America’s least reliable cell provider, with endless outages and now a huge fine – how much more can customers take?

AT&T customers across the US suffered yet another service outage Tuesday — just one day after the company was fined nearly $1 million by a government watchdog.

A software issue crashed service last night and left customers seeing ‘SOS’ instead of the usual bars on their phones and disrupted 911 services.

AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly has since stated that the issue has been resolved – but it marks the fifth outage or data breach for the firm in 2024 alone.

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) slapped the company with a $950,000 fine for an outage that occurred in August 2023 and prevented customers from being able to call 911.

AT&T customers across the US hit with another outage that prevented them from completing calls, sending texts or accessing the internet from their iPhones.

The FCC said AT&T failed to notify emergency call centers of the outage in a timely manner.

The company – which has 115m wireless subscribers – has had more outages of late than any other cell service provider, comms expert Harold Feld told DailyMail.com. 

This most recent outage prevented AT&T customers across the US from placing or receiving calls, sending texts or accessing the internet on their iPhones.

Customers began flooding AT&T’s Help channel on X (formerly Twitter) and the Downdetector site with outage reports around 5pm ET on Tuesday.

They also took to social media to share their frustration over the carrier’s repeated technical issues. 

‘I’m boutta switch my cell phone service cuz AT&T got me f***** up with all these outages & data breaches,’ TawnyT. said on X, formerly Twitter. 

The outage lasted several hours and left customers’ iPhones in Emergency SOS via Satellite Mode, which only allows them to make emergency calls via satellite.

Still, some government entities across the country released statements that the outage was or could prevent AT&T customers from calling 911, including in Tennessee, California, Arkansas and Florida.

It’s too early to say whether this most recent outage led to any preventable harms or deaths, but it’s certainly possible, according to Feld. 

‘The need for 911 is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So even an outage that takes place in the early morning hours can interfere with the smooth operation of 911 and lead to preventable deaths,’ he said. 

The outage was not nationwide, but it appeared to span a broad geographic range.

The cities most affected were Dallas, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York City, according to Downdetector.

‘Our customers expect and deserve reliable connectivity. When service disruptions occur, our team of network experts work to restore service as quickly as possible,’ an AT&T spokesperson told DailyMail.com in a written statement.

‘We value our customers and keeping them connected is our top priority.’ 

This week’s FCC fine isn’t AT&T’s first FCC penalty. The carrier was previously fined $5.25 million for two 911 outages that affected over 15,000 emergency calls in 2017. 

It does appear that AT&T is experiencing more outages than other cell service providers, but it’s still a very small number of outages, Feld said.

Still, the company has been marred by major technical issues this year, leading customers to question it’s reliability. 

In February, AT&T’s network went down for 11 hours due to an internal error, preventing customers from calling, texting, or accessing the internet from their cell phones.

Just a few weeks later in March, a data leak that included personal information from 73 million customers was released to the ‘dark web,’ raising security concerns.

In June, another outage prevented some AT&T customers from completing calls between carriers. 

And just last month, a massive security breach leaked call and text message data from mid-to-late 2022 of tens of millions of AT&T customers. 

It’s not yet clear whether the FCC will investigate Tuesday’s outage. But Feld thinks that it will take more than short-term assessments to determine whether AT&T is truly reliable.

‘FCC really ought to do not just a short term assessment for each individual outage, but ought to do long term assessments to look at carrier history and see if there are patterns of neglect, he said.

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Publish date : 2024-08-28 09:23:00

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