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Mobile giant AT&T is preparing to pay millions of dollars to current and former customers to settle a class action lawsuit over a pair of massive data breaches.
A judge has granted preliminary approval for a settlement that will hand $177 million to people affected by the breaches.
The first breach is believed to have happened back in 2019, with hackers stealing sensitive data from 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former customers.
Although AT&T believes the data may have been taken from one of its vendors, the firm has acknowledged that data including customers’ social security numbers, names and dates of birth was exposed.
The second breach happened last year, when hackers breached the company’s Snowflake cloud workspace environment, stealing smartphone call and text metadata of nearly 110 million customers from May of 2022 to October of 2022.
People who can prove they suffered financial damages as a result of the data breaches will likely receive a larger share of the payout.
At time of publishing, affected customers are expected to receive notice of eligibility by mail or email, with the claims process coming in August.
