AT&T's massive outage shows how not to do customer service in social media age

AT&T's U-verse service (disclosure, I'm a customer) has had massive outages across the country -- apparently -- for a day or more. The company's response shows how not to do customer service in today's social media world (or one that, just in general, relies on that internet pipe).

I say "apparently" because AT&T has been less than forthcoming in what it's telling people.  You won't find anything on the company's much-touted @ATTCares account on Twitter.

Its @Uverse account is nothing but marketing

What few statements have come from AT&T PR folks have been opaque

The tech support site has a canned statement

And canned chat

The best info is coming from third-party sites like downdetector.com

This probably should be taught as a textbook case study in business and communications schools about how not to handle things in 2016. (I'm also fascinated that it seems few news organizations seem to have picked up on how widespread these problems seem to be.)

Now that's customer service

One of the downsides of the digital age is that it's easy for your site to get overrun with just a few mentions online or in mainstream media.

Such was the case with Twitalyzer, one of the Twitter analytics services that has sprung up in recent years. A mention in the New York Times, another in the Wall Street Journal and - bam - the servers are overrun.

As founder and CEO Eric Peterson wrote in a post titled "An Apology to Our Customers":

While we are honored by the attention, one really unfortunate thing happened in the midst of all of this … we let our paying customers down. Because of the traffic deluge last week our databases were over-run and could not keep up with processing. Even if that hadn’t happened, it would not have mattered, since our Twitter-given API limit was exceeded for more or less the entire day.

In the end we failed to do the one thing you pay us to do: track your accounts each and every day.

So what will he do?

To make it up to you, our loyal and paying customers, we are happy to do the only reasonable thing: For everyone who was a customer as of Friday, March 25th, we will gladly refund your entire month’s fees for March via Paypal if you would like.

We let you down, and because we let you down we firmly and strongly believe we need to make it up to you. Refunding your money is the least we can do, but hopefully all of you will see this as a small token of our appreciation. We are becoming a great company and a great Twitter analytics brand because of you … and for that we thank you.

If you would like the refund all you have to do is email us and ask, no questions asked.

I suspect this isn't particularly chump change for a company this size. A few more companies, for which it would be a rounding error might take note.