AT&T Fiber Internet Outage

Hardware and technical stuff
1

So, my AT&T fiber internet has been down since Friday 830 am.

They originally offered to have a technician out as early as Wednesday, 5 full days after the service went down.

I said that was unacceptable, I work remotely and need the internet. Also, I had already spoken with my neighbors on nextdoor, and their AT&T fiber was down as well.

Their service app was a complete joke.

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No outage except for the outage…

Every csr I spoke to said there was no outage, but I would insist there was, and they would check again, and indeed it was an outage. One CSR said it was my insisting on an outage that helped them discover it. Great, I did your job for you. All my lines were intact, plus my neighbor also reported no service.

I was first quoted 24 hours to restore service Friday afternoon, and left it like that.

Sat morning, still no service. CSR says they are working on it right now, should be working soon. My neighbor said on the phone that there was a line break, and it was being worked on.

Saturday afternoon, still no service, so I call again. They say that the techs have implemented the fix, and are testing it, should be up by this evening.

Sat 9pm, I get on AT&T chat, ask what the deal is, the CSR I spoke with had said it would be up by tonight and it was not. I am starting to lose my cool at this point, as I am clearly being lied to about the work. The CSR continues to reiterate specific language “they are working on restoration of service as soon as possible”. I ask for an estimate and badger them quite a bit, and they admit “24 hours” is the number given when there is no estimate.

Sun a.m. No internet for 48 hours. My tp link Kasa smart plugs begin giving up. I am getting more furious as now the day/night cycle lights I have for my aquariums do not work.

Tommorrow is a holiday, and there is no way they have trucks out on Labor Day.

I have work Tuesday morning. My work laptop does not work with my phone Hotspot.

2

It is indeed totally unacceptable to have service out that long and have no real prognosis for when it’s coming up. Had there been a natural disaster, or something similar, that would be one thing – but it sounds like your haven’t received any reason for the outage (beyond the “cut line,” which is possible, but usually a relatively quick fix even with buried fiber.

One bright spot: from friends who work in the industry, they definitely have repair crews working holidays, and they earn pretty good overtime, generally, for doing so.

3

I would understand if it was just my place down. Hard to prioritize a single home issue, but this is an entire block down.

They either don’t have enough equipment or techs working.

4

While ATT front line CSRs don’t have much info other than what you’ve been told, a real fiber cut should be pretty quickly repaired if it’s only affecting a block or a neighborhood. It just isn’t going to be that big of a pipe. And if it’s a larger pipe that too would get repaired inside of 24 hours (prob much quicker) since that would get more resources. The only thing I’ve seen take longer is something involving standing water in manhole that prohibits access or something along those lines. But then I’d expect even front line CSRs for home users would have that info as it makes their slower TTR more reasonable.

Have you checked any outage map sites? Might not be a large enough outage to make a bump there, but I’ve found info on smaller issues at times there.

5

The outage map website does not show an outage.

The “smart home manager” app does show an outage in our immediate area.

(image of outage removed as to not doxx myself)

The CSRs are just giving a canned answer of “24 hours” to restore service. I also suspect some of them are just making shit up to try to get me off the line.

Look up “AT&T outage” on reddit for multiple stories of 5+ day service outages.

Just a warning before you decide to switch services to AT&T fiber, they clearly don’t staff up enough techs and equipment to deal with outages, so being out internet for a week is a very likely possibility.

6

I can corroborate. I’ve had it for years and when there’s a problem the CSR will straight up lie to you. My modem had a thing where every five minutes, precisely, it would ARP flood my local subnet, causing a loss of traffic for five seconds at a time. I had ping logs and everything, they would tell me, “Oh, yes, there’s an outage in your area, we’re working on it.”

“It’s not an outage, it’s the modem.”

“It will be resolved soon.”

“It’s been years.”

Anyway, new service, no problems yet.

7

I’ve called to report a power outage before and the rep didn’t believe me because nobody else had reported it. Yeah that’s because I’m not a moron. I checked my breaker, I checked that my neighbor lost power too so I knew it was a power company issue.

I’ve also called to report lost cable. I saw the cable from the pole dangling on the sidewalk. They didn’t believe me.

I hate tech support sometimes. I know they have to deal with complete morons usually so they save time by doing all the “reboot modem/devices” dance. So annoying. There was one cable company that at least recognized I had already done that so they wouldn’t ask me to do it again.

8

This seems intentional. Companies like to hide failure behind walls.

9

I can give them credit to at least listening to me when I said that I checked the lines and they were all intact.

Probably helped by one of my neighbors calling about the outage. The tech on the phone thanked me and said I helped them discover the outage existed.

Just unbelievable to have a policy not to inform customers the reason for the outage and estimated timeline.

The canned “24” hours is infuriating, because it sounds like an estimate, but it is useless. 72 hours now.

The "technicians are I the area and working to get it resolved ASAP is a lie, and they shouldn’t keep repeating that. I can see the neighborhood, there are no trucks. Nobody is actively working on it.

I am assuming they are waiting for a part or a bucket truck or licensed tech, but they won’t tell us that.

Just be fucking honest about it. I feel like I have been lied to every day. Just say, there is an issue and it is complicated and it is going to take time to diagnose and fix.

Lying and saying that someone is working on it just pisses me off.

10

I called today and the tech said the outage note says 3pm today it should be fixed.

They said they would call me back after that to check.

I just need to know if I need to make plans to drive in to work tomorrow, since I cannot work from home with no internet.

11

Based on the frequency I get harassed by door calls, they certainly don’t have that problem in sales!

12

I can commiserate. I had AT&T internet “service” for around 5 years, and battled them at least 5 times in 5 years about getting someone out to finally fix outages and slow internet at my house. It was the worst experience I ever had paying money for any service.

Bad enough that I ran willingly into the arms of Comcast as soon as their service was available in my neighborhood. I’ve had zero outages in 7 years, and the one problem I had they fixed within 12 hours.

13

Ah yes, their modem/router is kinda shit. I remember Zoom/Teams/whatever videoconferences would invariably cause wifi to die randomly before I swapped in an an actual functional router and bridged it.

14

I missed this part on my first read through. Pretty shocking they’ll let a whole bunch of houses go without access without bringing people in for emergency repairs.

I think the only time it would make sense to leave a block down would be if this was natural disaster related and they had people all round the city without access. But it doesn’t sound like that was the case.

Unfortunately I feel like a lot of us are stuck with our service providers — it’s largely a monopoly. Our condo complex doesn’t allow us to put on roof antennas so I think I’m stuck with access through the cable company. I’d imagine a lot of others are as well.

I hope you’re back online again soon @JonRowe

15

We switched from Spectrum 2 years ago. I didn’t hate spectrum, and for the 10 or so years we had it (often the only option, depending on where we we living) there was never an outage like this. 12 hours max.

But when AT&T offered 1 gig speeds up/down for the same price as spectrum and TV through directv stream for the same price as our 300mbps down / 10 up, it was a no Brainer. Free install and a 150$ visa gift card to switch.

Been a huge fan of their service to this point, but for them to let an entire neighborhood (5+ households) go without internet for an entire holiday weekend shows you that they do not prioritize the customers they do have.

Their CSR and outage tracking have been worse than useless, they have no information, or choose to promise a restoration time that does not actually happen.

I have seen 0 AT&T trucks all weekend. Nobody is actually working on this, as it is a holiday weekend, but they would rather lie to me than tell me the truth that they don’t have enough people or equipment to handle their network in my area.

Our house is still wired for cable. We have options.

I am completely shocked that they would allow an outage to last this long, but perusing online 4+ day outages are fairly typical.

16

Tuesday morning, still no internet.

17

Maybe you didn’t pay your bill :)

18

That’s fucking ridiculous. I know you don’t need any of us to validate how absurd it is that a “24 hour” outage lasts 5 days, but seriously, WTF.

Have you tried calling them out on social media? Ridiculous, I know, but at least back in the pre-Musk days, the customer support folks from major carriers on Twitter were often able to get things accelerated.

After this is said and done, you should also complain to the city and the state public utility/public service commission, and cc AT&T on the complaint.

19

I did, and they asked to get in touch via dm.

Very helpful.

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Again, if this was just a cable issue at my house to the street, I would understand not getting priority, I would be pissed at 4 days, but this is an entire block of houses out for 4 days.

It was a holiday weekend sure, but they had all business day Friday and Saturday to get it addressed.

I also love that I have to call them to ask for them to credit me for the days the service was down. If it was just a day, I wouldn’t bother, but 4 days, sheesh.

20

Update:

They are either giving me another line, or this was the actual issue

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So, the problem, I am going to assume, was that they did not have the right equipment in storage, and had to wait the entire weekend for it to get delivered to do the work.

If they would have told me this on Saturday afternoon, when I inquired about why it hadn’t been fixed, I would be more understanding. I would be pissed at AT&T for not having adequate repair inventory, but at least I could understand, shit happens.