US President Donald Trump criticized AT&T on Monday after technical problems disrupted a nationwide conference call with faith leaders. He blamed the carrier for the outage and suggested the White House might change providers for future calls.
“I’m doing a major Conference Call with Faith Leaders from all over the Country, and AT&T is totally unable to make their equipment work properly,” Trump posted on social media, urging AT&T’s leadership to intervene and noting, “There are tens of thousands of people on the line!”
He did not provide further technical details about the fault.
AT&T later responded on X to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying it had contacted the administration to investigate the incident. By evening, the company reported that its review suggested the problem lay with the conference call platform itself rather than AT&T’s network.
“Unfortunately, this caused the delay, and we are working diligently to better understand the issue so we can prevent disruptions in the future,” AT&T said in its statement.
Trump subsequently apologised to participants, calling the interruption “a long wait” and reiterating that another carrier might be used for future calls. AT&T’s stock dipped briefly after his post but recovered quickly as investors treated the outage as an isolated incident.
Trump’s remarks follow the recent announcement by the Trump Organization about a new mobile business. Earlier this month, the company licensed the Trump name to launch “Trump Mobile,” a U.S.-based phone and service offering. The package includes a $499 smartphone and claims to operate on all three major U.S. carriers; financial terms have not been disclosed.
The conference call disruption also comes amid heightened scrutiny of AT&T after multiple security incidents that exposed customer data. The company has confirmed two major breaches affecting millions of users.
The first breach has been linked to the hacking group Shiny Hunters. Although AT&T initially denied a breach in 2021, more than 70 million records surfaced for sale online in 2024. Security researchers later found that encrypted customer passcodes in the leaked data were easy to crack, prompting AT&T to reset affected users’ passwords. On April 2, the company acknowledged that 73 million current and former customers had been impacted.
A second breach revealed in July 2024 involved a third-party cloud storage provider. Hackers accessed AT&T call and text metadata from 2022, affecting around 109 million U.S. customers. While customer names were not exposed, the volume of data led to criminal arrests.
Those incidents prompted several class-action lawsuits. A U.S. district judge has given preliminary approval to a settlement covering both breaches. Eligible users may file claims for compensation based on their level of exposure and documented harm.
Key points about the settlement process include:
- Who qualifies: Anyone whose data was compromised in either breach.
- Payouts: Up to $5,000 for claimants who can prove damages tied to the 2019 breach, and up to $2,500 for damages from the 2024 breach.
- Other affected customers may receive smaller payments without submitting proof, depending on the settlement outcome.
- Timeline: Notices are scheduled to be sent by August 4, 2025. The deadline to file a claim is November 18, 2025, and payments could begin in early 2026 pending final court approval set for December 3, 2025.
The settlement is among the larger telecom-related data class actions in recent years and underscores growing regulatory and public attention on how providers secure customer information.
(Photo by Rubaitul Azad)
See also: AT&T achieves 20Gbps speeds on a production fibre network
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