New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced on Thursday that she’s opened an investigation into the recent AT&T outage that left customers across the country without service. And if you live in the state of New York, James would like to hear from you.
“Americans rely on cell service providers for consistent and reliable service to help them with nearly every aspect of their daily lives,” James said in a statement published online.
“Nationwide outages are not just an inconvenience, they can be dangerous, and it’s critical that we protect consumers when an outage occurs. I encourage any New Yorker who was affected by this disruption to file a complaint with my office,” James continued.
The outage started the morning of February 22 and left wireless customers puzzled about what might be happening. Initially, people with other carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon also reported their networks were down, though we learned later it was simply a product of so many carriers piggybacking on top of each other. Just because you pay T-Mobile each month doesn’t mean you’re always connecting to T-Mobile’s towers.
Several conspiracy theories started to circulate online during the outage, with many people comparing it to the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind and Alex Jones even insisting it must be the Chinese government conducting a cyberattack against American infrastructure. But AT&T later explained there was no cyberattack.
AT&T has offered a $5 credit to customers over the outage, though many on social media complained that wasn’t enough. And while you’re free to complain to anyone who will listen on Facebook and X, telling government investigators seems like it could be a more productive endeavor.
New Yorkers are encouraged to file a complaint with the Office of the Attorney General’s online portal.
