AT&T's Mass Notification of Data Breach Overwhelms Experian's Systems
Charles M. Walls | April 11, 2024 | Views: 188
In a recent maneuver, one of America's major wireless service providers, AT&T, opted to notify over 70 million customers of a data breach—all in one go. This flood of notifications, which hit inboxes on April 11th, follows the company's initial breach disclosure on March 30th.
The breach, as outlined in an email sent at 3:23 p.m. ET, compromised certain customer information, although it reassuringly spared financial details and call records. In an effort to bolster security, AT&T is resetting account passcodes and has teamed up with Experian to offer a year of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection. Experian, a leading global credit reporting agency, provides sophisticated tools for managing credit and fraud risks.
Customers received a free subscription code and a link to sign up on Experian's platform. However, our attempt to register revealed significant slowdowns—probably a consequence of the sudden surge in traffic from AT&T customers. The Experian server was sluggish, frequently returning HTTP 500 errors, and for a time, SMS login via their mobile app was disrupted.
Despite these hiccups, the offer from Experian is valid. Persistence paid off, and after enduring slow response times and multiple timeouts, we successfully enrolled in the service. This situation was mirrored in a spike in user complaints reported by Downdetector around 5 p.m. ET, indicating a broad impact.
Experian acknowledged the high traffic on its platform, noting on X (formerly Twitter) at 4:54 p.m. ET that its site had stabilized. Yet, as late as 6 p.m. ET, many users still found the site unresponsive, suggesting ongoing challenges in handling the influx.
This case underscores the complexities of managing large-scale communications in the wake of data breaches and the critical need for robust digital infrastructure to support such massive and immediate customer interactions.
