AT&T

AT&T to Pay $177 Million to Settle Two 2024 Customer Data Breach Class Actions

AT&T has agreed to pay a total of $177 million to resolve two separate class-action lawsuits stemming from major customer data leaks that occurred in 2024. The settlement, approved on October 2 by Judge Sidney Fitzwater in the Northern District of Texas, allocates $149 million to the first breach and $28 million to the second, covering compensation, attorney fees, and administrative costs. The first incident, disclosed on March 30, 2024, exposed personal information of 73 million individuals, including names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, account passwords, billing numbers, and Social Security numbers for some victims, with records dating from 2019 or earlier found on the dark web. The second breach originated from unauthorized access to AT&T’s Snowflake cloud environment between April 14 and 25, 2024, affecting nearly all mobile customers and revealing call metadata such as phone numbers, interaction counts, durations, and cell tower identifiers from May to October 2022 plus January 2023. No evidence of direct system intrusion was found in the first case, and the second exposure did not include Social Security numbers or call content. Individual claimants can receive up to $5,000 or $2,500 respectively for documented losses, with the claims deadline set for December 18, 2025. AT&T settled without admitting any wrongdoing or liability.