A U.S. judge has granted preliminary approval to a $177 million class-action settlement with AT&T, resolving lawsuits tied to major data breaches in 2024 that exposed the personal information of tens of millions of customers.
U.S. District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas ruled the settlement was fair and reasonable, allowing compensation for those affected by the breaches. Depending on the incident, affected customers can claim up to $2,500 or $5,000 for losses “fairly traceable” to the breaches. Any remaining funds will be distributed among customers whose data was accessed.
AT&T has denied responsibility for the breaches, calling them “criminal acts” and stating the settlement was made to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. The company expects the deal to receive final approval by late 2025, with payouts beginning in early 2026.
One of the breaches involved the illegal download of 109 million customer records, including call and text logs stored on a Snowflake cloud platform, covering six months of activity from 2022. In another incident, a dark web data dump in March 2024 revealed information on 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former customers, believed to date back to 2019 or earlier.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also investigating AT&T over these breaches. In a separate case, the company paid $13 million in 2023 to settle an FCC probe into a data leak involving 8.9 million customers, with records dating from 2015 to 2017 that should have been deleted years earlier.
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