Atlanta, GA — When East Lake resident Aaron Sheinin contacted Decaturish asking for help publicizing an AT&T Fiber outage, he’d been without internet for three days.

“AT&T refuses to say what is happening or how long it will be out,” he said on May 11.

Attempts by Decaturish to get answers proved equally challenging. A reporter was unable to find contact information for the AT&T press office on its website. A call to AT&T customer service eventually yielded an email address for the company’s press contact. It was an adventure from there. An ATT spokesperson responded on May 11 and asked for the addresses of each home affected by the outage. A reporter provided an outage map from the AT&T website.

But the AT&T spokesperson declined to acknowledge whether the map was sufficient information to provide comment about what was going on, and eventually stopped responding to questions until May 16.

“We’ve restored home phone and internet service to affected customers in the East Lake area after a utility pole carrying our equipment was damaged during a car accident,” the spokesperson said on May 16. “Customers currently experiencing issues with their AT&T service can reach us at att.com, on the myAT&T app or over the phone at 800.288.2020.”

AT&T did not immediately respond to a question about how many residents were affected by the outage and why it took days to restore service.

While Comcast / Xfinity is also the subject of frequent customer complaints in Atlanta’s two-provider high-speed internet market, they have an easy-to-find public information office that provides timely updates about what’s happening and when service is expected to be restored.

Sheinin said AT&T’s response to the outage was “not cool.”

His internet went out on Tuesday, May 9, and was restored on Friday, May 12. Posts in the East Lake Neighborhood Facebook group showed that at least one customer went without internet for six days.

Sheinin said some customers remain without service as of today, May 16.

“I still don’t know exactly what happened, but some neighbors said they heard from AT&T that a cable had been cut,” he said. “OK, I get it, things happen. But during those three-plus days that we had no service and had to scramble for work and homework, we couldn’t get any information from them. They stopped estimating restoration time after a while, calling and chatting did no good. I finally called to demand at least a refund for the days we were without service and, thankfully, they agreed to that.”

He said that he doesn’t mind when service goes down for legitimate reasons, but said AT&T gaslit customers and left them in the dark.

“It was a wide swath of East Lake and I think parts of Oakhurst that were down,” Sheinin said. “Some neighbors apparently are still without service. It has to be a few hundred customers, judging by the footprint and the messages I’ve seen on the neighborhood Facebook page.”