The Scoop: Most recent AT&T outage puts brand at risk

If AT&T is your cell phone carrier, you might have had trouble making calls yesterday afternoon. That’s because a large-scale outage impacted customers for hours, inhibiting communication and leading to frustration.

If social media is any indication, the telecom carrier’s customers were none too happy about the outage.

Come on @ATT, let’s get it together here. These service issues are getting old. Once again, I can’t call out or receive a call and that’s including WiFi calling.

We better be getting more than a $5 credit. Otherwise, I’m going back to @Verizon. @ATTHelp pic.twitter.com/abIha6OPMK

— SyracuseAsh🧡💙 (@syracuseashley) June 4, 2024

According to a report by CNN, smaller outages of a few minutes aren’t uncommon on such a large network, but when they take longer than 15 minutes to fix, it’s cause for concern. The outage reports began in the early afternoon and were largely resolved by the early evening.

Tuesday’s outage follows a similar incident that happened in February in which customers also lost the ability to make calls, send texts or get in touch with emergency services for several hours. In that situation, AT&T did apologize and offered a $5 credit to impacted customers.

Why it matters: When you’re a cellphone carrier and your technical issues prevent people from using their phones, that’s a pretty easy to way break down trust with your customers. Between the two outages this year and a data breach in March, AT&T is actively at risk of eroding customer trust in its brand.

Social media was ablaze yesterday with criticism of AT&T’s lack of reliability, with some users even threatening to defect to rival phone carriers. In a statement yesterday afternoon, AT&T put out a very brief statement, simply saying “Nationwide 9-1-1 Services are operating normally at this time and our customers are not affected.” There was no apology from the CEO as in the February outage, and no credit was offered. Just a sentence stating the facts. Sure, a more detailed and conciliatory statement might be coming, but this was pretty bare bones on the heels of a nationally recognized crisis.

If customers feel they aren’t they might seek to bring their business elsewhere, unless you do some major cleanup work in the public eye. That’s why crisis response is so critically important, and AT&T should already have a plan in place to approach this most recent issue.

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Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.