AT&T

On July 12, 2024 AT&T disclosed that hackers had stolen call and text-message metadata for 'nearly all' of its approximately 110 million wireless customers between May 1 and October 31, 2022. The data was exfiltrated from a third-party cloud workspace hosted on Snowflake using stolen customer credentials. AT&T reportedly paid the threat actor approximately $370,000 in Bitcoin to delete the data. The DOJ allowed disclosure to be delayed twice on national-security grounds before the eventual filing.

On April 29, 2024 the Federal Communications Commission announced a $57 million fine against AT&T as part of a joint enforcement action against the four largest US wireless carriers (totaling more than $200M) for selling customer real-time location data to third-party aggregators including data brokers, bail bondsmen and bounty hunters without meaningful customer consent. The fines followed years of investigation triggered by 2018 reporting by Motherboard.

AT&T led industry trade group challenges to California's SB-822 net-neutrality law throughout 2018-2022, arguing federal preemption after the FCC's 2017 Title II repeal. The Ninth Circuit upheld the California law in January 2022; AT&T's industry coalition petition for Supreme Court review was denied in May 2022. AT&T's parallel federal lobbying spend exceeded $10M annually during this period opposing restoration of net-neutrality rules.

On March 30, 2021 AT&T announced a $2 billion commitment over three years to address the homework gap and digital divide via the AT&T Connected Learning initiative, including discounted broadband for low-income families, free Wi-Fi connected community spaces (AT&T Connected Learning Centers), and computer-science curriculum funding. The pledge was among the largest single corporate commitments to digital-equity programs of the pandemic-recovery period.