AT$T's Outage Mea Culpa

Posted on December 12, 2007 - 9:15am.

Note: AT&T's U-verse service suffered a national outage in late October, the lack of support then was as notable as what people experienced this past week.

from: Broadband Reports

AT&T's Outage Mea Culpa
Trying to correct support implosion
08:44AM Monday Dec 10 2007 by Karl

AT&T is still apologizing for last week's outage that disrupted DSL service for much of the Southeast. At the end of the day, the story wasn't that the company suffered from an isolated router malfunction -- but that the entire support system of the nation's largest ISP collapsed under the weight of frustrated users. 35 minutes after the outage, a recorded message went up alerting customers to call back later. Some customers weren't having it:

The acknowledgement came too late for Paula Stotts, who canceled her AT&T DSL service Wednesday afternoon after repeated attempts to contact customer service. "My service was still out when I canceled it," said Stotts, of Jonesboro, Ga. Ironically, she works in technical support (not for AT&T). "I understand that things can go wrong. But the fact I couldn't reach someone for three days was unacceptable. I just wanted to know what was going wrong."

( categories: AT&T )