AT&T sent emails to 70 million customers, causing a spike in traffic at Experian. Here’s what happened

If you have many customers, you need to reach out about an important communication, e.g data breachIt might be a good idea to space those communications over a few days instead of doing it all at once.

However, it seems one of America’s largest wireless carriers did just that – sending them all at once. On April 11, AT&T emailed more than 70 million of its customers affected by the data breach disclosed by the company on March 30.

Also: AT&T resets passwords for 7.6 million customers after data leak What the experts are saying

In the email, sent at 3:23 p.m. ET and presumably sent to tens of millions of its customers, AT&T said that a breach (which it had disclosed in a previous email on March 30 3) customer information has been violated. However, financial details and call history remain confidential.

In response, the company is resetting account passcodes and offering one year of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection through Experian’s. IdentityWorks service. Experian is a major global credit reporting agency providing data and analytical tools to monitor credit and fraud, serving both individuals and businesses.

In the email, AT&T provided a free registration code and a link to the Experian website to sign up. When trying to sign up, we noticed that the server was extremely slow and also returned an HTTP 500 error, presumably due to high levels of traffic being redirected from AT&T email to their customers. We also noticed that SMS logins also stopped working through Experian’s mobile app.

The sign up offer was real and we were finally able to log in after a few minutes. However, performance was very slow and it took us more than half an hour to add our account information for monitoring, and we encountered multiple HTTP timeouts.

The increase in traffic at Experian was confirmed by detector down service, showed a significant increase in user reports around 5 p.m. ET.

On Twitter, at 4:54 p.m. ET Experian notes on X that its website is stable. However, as of 6 p.m. ET, the site remained unresponsive. Stay tuned to ZDNET for the latest updates on the situation.