AT&T Goes Dark In Wake Of Hurricane Posted by Pile (10570 views) [E-Mail link]

[ Faulty Products ] Despite the day earlier, statements being issued by major cellular companies that they were prepared for Gustav, one company wasn't. AT&T customers in the New Orleans area experienced a total loss of cellular service for almost the entire day during the impact of Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana.

I had a friend stay with me in the city. His phone was with AT&T. He lost service sometime around 7:00am, the time Gustav was making landfall, and service was not restored until more than 12 hours later -- at one point his phone became active and said, "Emergency calls only" yet he was unable to make any kind of call -- it was as if AT&T was mocking him. Later that evening, he received a text message, AT&T was sorry for the outage and were going to offer their customers a free month of service.



This seems to be particularly hypocritical given AT&T's new ad campaign touting the "reliability" of their network to be helpful to people when they need to make important calls. Apparently, a life-and-death situation like a massive hurricane is not serious enough for AT&T to ensure its infrastructure operates. This is particularly shameful considering we know of no other cell providers that lost service. I was with Verizon and had cell service throughout the event. Let this be a lesson to some of you....

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