‘It is alarming:’ After second outage this year, experts say AT&T risks customer loyalty

By Samantha Delouya, Samantha Murphy Kelly and Ramishah Maruf, CNN

(CNN) — AT&T’s second prolonged outage so far this year left customers irate on Tuesday, with experts criticizing the company’s response and saying the wireless company risked losing user loyalty over the issues.

“Come on AT&T, let’s get it together here. These service issues are getting old,” said one social media user. “We better be getting more than a $5 credit. Otherwise I’m going back to Verizon.”

Though outages can affect any company, it’s not normal to have two long outages in a short period of time, Mojtaba Vaezi, a professor and director of the Wireless Networking Laboratory at Villanova University, said to CNN.

“If it’s something that’s happening with a software update dysfunctioning with some systems, usually they have back-ups and people working around the clock,” Vaezi said. “When it takes longer than 10 to 15 minutes, it is alarming.”

Although AT&T did not share the number of impacted customers, website Down Detector shows a spike in reports of issues using the service starting around 1 pm ET on Tuesday. Those numbers climbed in the hours that followed. By 6 pm ET, however, the number of reported incidents sharply declined, according to Down Detector.

The site listed New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis as among the cities with the most reports of issues.

Because of the problem connecting to other carriers, thousands of Verizon customers also reported a service outage on Down Detector Tuesday.

In a statement Tuesday, AT&T said it had resolved the outage and that calls between AT&T customers were not impacted.

In February, a massive outage knocked out service for AT&T’s network for nearly 12 hours. Tens of thousands of AT&T customers in America could not make phone calls, send texts, reach emergency services or access the internet. At the time, the mobile network issued a $5 credit to impacted customers.

Impact on customer trust

Some subscribers complained that AT&T had waited too long to alert them of the outage, leaving them scrambling to figure out what happened.

“It would be great if AT&T would notify customers of this problem before each of us wastes time trying to figure out what is wrong,” said one Reddit user.

Karen North, a communication professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in brand management and crisis communications, said AT&T’s initial lack of communication may damage customer faith in the company.

“Silence is almost never the right answer when users are involved. People need to know what’s happening and when it’s going to be fixed,” North said.

AT&T told CNN on Tuesday that 911 calls were going through, despite a few locations, including Camden County, Georgia, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, issuing alerts on social media that the outage was disrupting calls to 911. AT&T told CNN the alerts were received accidentally and the company is investigating why that happened.

After two consecutive outages and a March data breach, North said AT&T needs to work to regain customer trust.

“They need to put out a very clear message about why they should be trusted in the future to resolve this,” North said. “And they probably need to show empathy for the fact that this isn’t just a phone. This is, professionally and personally, a lifeline for people to their families, their friends and their businesses.”

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