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AT&T sets comically narrow definition of ‘service outage’ to constrain compensation — after big outage impacted 125 million wireless devices, blocked 92 million phone calls

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 estim…

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: 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.” 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).

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