AT&T Drops Verizon Ad Campaign Lawsuits

By Dena Cassella December 2, 2009

Today, AT&T dropped its pending Verizon “There’s a Map for That” lawsuits and decided to play nice after all. Weird, we wonder where all this passivity, forgiveness and good holiday cheer came from—oh wait, that’s right, AT&T lost its request to have Verizon’s ads pulled down and just ranked lowest in customer satisfaction ratings. Well, at least now everyone can move on and do what they should’ve been doing all along—like gaining customer support by lowering prices and upping service quality.

The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T invited a lot of Industry criticism with its Verizon campaign lawsuits because it “drew more attention to the campaign and opened AT&T to further ridicule.” AT&T had already been hit with criticism over its network congestion issues, and then after ranking lowest in customer satisfaction on a Consumer Reports survey, the service provider was dealing with a range of disapproval from consumers and the mobile community.

Let this be a lesson to you AT&T, just because you have the iPhone doesn’t mean you’re the top dog in wireless carriers. There was no reason to bring the courts or Luke Wilson into this.

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Were you affected by the AT&T outage? You may get some free money

Last Thursday was a bad day for AT&T. Early in the morning on February 22, AT&T's network went down for thousands of people across the U.S.. The network was offline for hours and outage reports on Down Detector peaked at nearly 75,000. It was eventually fixed, but the damage was still done. Thankfully, if you were among the many people impacted by the outage, we have some good news for you.

On February 24, AT&T published a page on its website called "Making it right." In short, if your AT&T service was down and you were affected by it, you're getting a discount on your next bill. The AT&T page reads as follows:

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AT&T reveals cause of Thursday’s massive outage

An AT&T service outage that impacted a huge number of its customers across the U.S. on Thursday was not caused by a cyberattack, the company’s initial investigation has revealed.

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Everything you need to know about the massive AT&T outage

Large 5G cellular tower with multiple mmWave transceivers against a blue sky.

Happy Thursday! February is drawing to a close, the weather is getting slightly warmer in parts of the country, and AT&T experienced a massive outage that affected its cellular and internet services. It was a bit of a mess.

How many people were without service? When was service restored? Here's a quick recap of what you need to know.
When did the AT&T outage start?
At around 4 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 22, more than 32,000 outages were reported across AT&T's network. Once 7 a.m. rolled around, that number jumped to over 50,000 people. Per the Down Detector website, there were nearly 75,000 outage reports just before 9:15 a.m. ET.
Is the AT&T outage over?
Thankfully, the AT&T outage has finally ended. At 11:15 a.m. ET, the company had restored "three-quarters" of its network. Then, at 3:10 p.m. ET, AT&T confirmed that it had "restored wireless service to all our affected customers."