The Digital Disasters That Cost AT&T Dearly
AT&T’s troubles began with not one, but two catastrophic security failures in 2024. The data breaches occurred in March and July 2024, creating a perfect storm of privacy violations that would eventually cost the company nearly $200 million to resolve.
The March breach was particularly devastating, exposing call and text records spanning from May 1, 2022, to October 31, 2022, for nearly all AT&T cellular customers. This wasn’t just a list of phone numbers – hackers accessed detailed metadata showing who called whom, when, and for how long. For millions of Americans, their most intimate communication patterns were laid bare to cybercriminals.
The July incident compounded the damage, affecting additional customer data and demonstrating a pattern of security negligence that would prove costly in court. Together, these breaches created what legal experts describe as one of the most comprehensive privacy violations in telecommunications history.
