AT$T's Outage Mea Culpa

Note: AT&T's U-verse service suffered a national outage in late October [1], the lack of support then was as notable as what people experienced this past week.

from: Broadband Reports [2]

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 [2] 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 [3]:

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."

Source URL:
http://saveaccess.orgnode/1932

Links:
[1] http://saveaccess.org/node/1718
[2] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATTs-Outage-Mea-Culpa-90102
[3] http://www.ajc.com/news/content/business/stories/2007/12/05/att_1206.html