iPHONE AND AT&T OUTAGE

I thought I forgot to pay my bill! Service in the south west suburbs has out all day. And attempting to contact someone at at&t for information on a Sunday is... well impossible.

Keep us posted!

SCOTT'S REPLY: Will do ... and please keep checking my Twitter feed as well. I'm updating as many sites at once as I can :-D

Hmmm, and the fact that iPhones went on sale at Walmart today has nothing to do with this? Because of Apple's decision to sell iPhones at Walmart, a lot of people are suffering from servie outage. I have had a complete service outage (no phone - E or 3G, no data connection, only local wifi access) since I woke up at 9:00 this morning. This is of extreme inconvenience to me on my day off (and I rarely get a Sunday off, so I'm beyond pissed at AT&T right now). I'm seriously considering cancelling my contract and unlocking my phone and switching over to T-Mobile unless AT&T gives me a full month of service for free or something of great value to compensate for this BS. And to top it off, AT&T's customer service is closed on Sunday, and you can only reach them through their emergency hotline number, where you'll have to wait on hold for 30 minutes.

SCOTT's REPLY: Turns out, no, it was a power outage at an equipment facility in Michigan.

same in Detroit

SCOTT'S REPLY: Yep. All of the Midwest.

The power outage in the Detroit area has been substantial - about 230,000 people without power across the whole area.

An overview of the situation with a map here:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/12/dte-power-outage-on-28-december-2008-takes-down-att-iphone-wireless-service.html

SCOTT'S REPLY: Great stuff, Edward, and thanks for the shoutout. I appreciate anything that folks do to keep people aware of the situation.

the reactions from at&t seems very irresponsible. power outages can be understood and acceptable, but where is the plan b or at least the communication to the customers. for a communications company, shouldn't communication be on the forefront of the company's mind?

i hope a lesson is learned here on at&t's part. i certainly learned one... sadly it's to lower my expectations from at&t.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I guess there can't always be a plan B, but there can ALWAYS be better communication with customers. I got good communication from my sources but a note on AT&T's Web site would have gone much further.

When I read two days ago that Apple and AT&T Wireless would be selling phones at Walmart starting today, I thought new activations might be the problem when I learned my phone was down. I went through the same nonsense of trying to reach a live person at AT&T Wireless. It was only when WGN Radio in Chicago came on the air with a news brief about the outage that I finally learned late this afternoon what was happening.

I'm going to go after AT&T hard on my charges for the month. Having service out all day, and failing to be proactive in reaching out to let customers know what was really going on, is totally unacceptable.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I agree that it's totally unacceptable to not be able to find out the status of the network.

i live in NW Indiana..and have nothing.."no service"...no voice...inability to make calls...no text no nothing...please tell me i am not the only remaining person without any ATT wireless service on my IPHONE 3G....i need some good news Scott....i have rebooted my phone many times and nothing...am i missing something....thanks..Che'

SCOTT'S REPLY: I think it's safe to assume you are not the last remaining person with trouble -- the release said most areas were back to normal. All you can really do now is wait - and reboot a few more times. if you wake up tomorrow and your iPhone is still down, do call them.

There is NO excuse for a power outage. Power off may screw your home computer but when you talk about nationwide operation, you certainly must utilize backup generators and such. Are they saying they went out of fuel or what ? Besides that, our AT&T T1 line is dead since Friday 1pm. Good job ATT.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Well, there were backup generators in place but apparently that didn't just instantly fix everyone's probably. Sad, but true.

I understand that the power outage may have been beyond AT&T's control. However, their reaction to it was far within their control and utterly inexcusable. First of all, it IS their fault that they don't have redundancy built into the system to provide for situations like this. Secondly, from a strict PR standpoint, they failed horribly. After two hours of the outage, I had to call an AT&T store to find out what was going on. I can deal with an outage of an hour or two, but an entire day? Unacceptable, regardless of what the cause is. I'm not some teenager who had to live without texting his or her friends for the day. I am in charge of a company that relies on our AT&T service for smooth operations. I will be calling today and demanding a credit.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I could not agree more, Phil. I said all day yesterday that there needed to be a mention online and there wasn't. I got information because I'm in the media, but without me posting it, you didn't know it. And most of the other so-called iPhone sites didn't even cover it. So yeah, more communication is a must.

Today I reached AT&T Wireless Customer Service to follow up on yesterday's outage. I let them know that it was unacceptable that the company had no timely link Sunday on its website announcing the problem; that no email or other communication was sent to customers to let us know the nature of the outage; and that no triage was set up on the fly to ensure that callers like me could reach a live human being in customer service. I also let them know that I didn't learn the nature and scope of the problem until late in the day from a WGN Radio broadcast in Chicago and through your blog (thank you, Scott).

SCOTT'S REPLY: Happy to help.

I let customer service know that I have three (3) iPhones on my account and that I expected reimbursement for the inconvenience of yesterday. I was offered reimbursement for Sunday only -- and after I fell out both laughing and protesting over a reimbursement of charges for a day when I had no usage or service availability, I was handed off to a supervisor. In the end, AT&T Wireless has now credited me for my recurring charges for the month of December. I'm certainly happy with this outcome.

There's a lesson to be learned: When a crisis hits, great companies move fast to deal with the problem, correct it, reward their customers for their inconvenience, and to communicate everything they know as quickly as possible. AT&T Wireless failed to do this Sunday, and it inflicted some damage that will take time to overcome.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Glad to hear you had this outcome. In the end, being polite and getting to the right person is the way to get what you want and what you deserve.

I guess it's reasonable that At&t could suffer a power outage (no backup power?), but to find out that they have no customer support on Sunday in this day and age is ridiculous.

For an organization of At&t's size and with so many customers totally dependent on them- they have no excuse not to provide 24/7 customer service. Outsource it to Mumbai if you have to, but don't leave your customers scrambling around, going thru telephone trees, checking bill payments to figure out why their phones don't work.

And no notice on the website?!!! That's just basic in 2008. This isn't what Apple wants to see in a long-term partner. AT&T's cracking the door open for Verizon and company.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I agree totally, John. I said it loud and clear that the communication was bare bones. I got info because of my media status, but that's far from enough in this case.

Talked to AT&T @ 2PM and was told that all problems had been fixed, except mine, I was about to find out. Can still call out, but now I can't received text messages which I could before and still can receive incoming calls. Living in the NW suburbs of Chicago I guess has a price, but I didn't think that meant that I couldn't have phone service. I don't know how they're going to let me know that this is fixed, this is my only phone and I need a different one to call them. Happy that most people have their phone service returned to normal, not very happy about mine still not working.

SCOTT'S REPLY: It's rare that things like this happen. Make sure you stay in touch with them and see if you can get a credit for your troubles. And keep me posted.

I know this is pretty much after the fact, but I did not seem to be affected by this at all. In fact, I was in an underground garage for two hours in Lakeview waiting for my car to be done and i had full service the whole time. I never seemed to lose service, but my girlfriend did lose service for about a half hour. Odd.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Well, hey ... that's great, then!!

To the AT&T Customers, I do apologize for the down time but this is like with any utility or computer there are times things fail. The problem started when a bad winter storm came through IL, IN, MI. When that happens no one knows

SCOTT'S REPLY: True, but there needs to be things in place in case something does go wrong.

How do you suggest that AT&T contact you to inform you, Radio, TV, newspaper, Postal Mail? Obviously they can’t text message you or call all 70 million subscriber if their system isn’t working

SCOTT'S REPLY: Big note at the front of attwireless.com. Plain and simple. Reach as many people as possible online.

As for reimbursement for your down time you simply take your monthly price plan, not including taxes or usage and divide by 30 and multiply by the number of day of outage. Example $39.99 /30 = 1.313 time 3 day outage would be $ 3.99.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Well, sure, but that's up to AT&T to decide.