Beginning on the night of Saturday, Oct. 21, and on through the early morning hours Sunday, broadband Internet services that AT&T offers over its Chicago-area cable systems were hit by two apparently unrelated bulk e-mailings that overloaded the system and disrupted e-mail service for 35,000 customers for extended periods.

I know, because I was one of those 35,000, and for more than two weeks, my e-mail was generally kaput.

What's strange about the incident was not that it happened, but how AT&T chose to explain the outage to customers. For some reason, company executives apparently believed customers would more placidly accept problems resulting from AT&T's acquisition of MediaOne Group than from the company's inability to protect its network from spammers. So, for five days, those of us who called customer service to ask why we didn't have e-mail were told of "problems switching equipment from MediaOne to AT&T."

Not true. What really happened was that AT&T experienced two "mail storms" - more than the weekend staff and its e-mail processing equipment could handle. Though the staff quickly identified the two sources of the spam overloads, it was too late to stop them. Customers' in-boxes soon overloaded and accounts were shut down. The spam traffic was so heavy that all the e-mail couldn't be housed on AT&T's available disk space.

Steve Lang, AT&T Broadband's vice president for public affairs, likened the situation to having two flat tires. Everyone is prepared for one flat, but never two. He's right. If only one spam flood had occurred, the equipment would have continued to function, but two simultaneous floods overwhelmed it.

As we move toward a world of 1 billion computers, the potential for mischief - a billion nails on the info highway, as it were - may well mean that Internet service providers will have to carry more than one spare tire. But why not just tell customers that?

Lang said AT&T's helpline personnel were not lying to customers about the source of the problem. Instead, he said, they were not given "perfect information" when they blamed a "switching equipment problem" for the e-mail shutdown. To his credit, Lang did not offer this explanation with much enthusiasm, because AT&T was clearly in no hurry to get more precise information to its customers. It wasn't until Friday, when I lost my temper and demanded to know exactly why the e-mail system was so fouled up, that someone told me, off the record, of the twin spam floods.

Finally, I had some kind of answer. But as for when it might be fixed, no one could say. The tech folks were doing their best, I was told. What really angered me, though, was not that I couldn't get my e-mail. Nor was it that spammers - may they burn in e-mail hell - had crashed the system. That can happen to the best service provider. No, what ticked me off was the suspicion that I had been lied to - and that it took several days and stubborn persistence to get the truth. And only part of the truth at that. The company remains mum on which pieces of hardware and/or software collapsed under the spammers' load.

"I don't think we're going to go through how each part of the network is configured," said Sarah Dusik, AT&T's director of external communications. "I think that some of those things are proprietary to AT&T."

Maybe. It's understandable why a service provider wouldn't want to publish a roadmap to the weakest links in its system. Still, it seems senseless for AT&T to conceal which hardware, from which maker, failed. Likewise, the shutdown involved a software failure, but AT&T refused to identify the vendor. "We have ongoing relationships with them," Dusik said in reference to the vendors. "We had full support throughout the issue."

Full support? And the system couldn't get back online for more than two weeks? I'm sure a lot of Interactive Week's readers would like to know the names of those vendors, if for no other reason than to investigate their "full support" response to this two-week meltdown - and to demand to know what changes they plan to make to their technology and support services.

Back to the Customers

Can AT&T just replace the truth, willy-nilly, with whatever fiction is convenient? Citing company policy, Chuck Benard, director of AT&T's Broadband Advanced Services, said, "Until we have discerned what the issue is, exactly, we will be very general in our information back to the customer."

Fair enough. But it's hard to figure how "problems switching equipment" is any more "general" than something like "system overloads due to spammers." AT&T knew the truth within minutes of the meltdown's beginning, yet chose to share less than "perfect information" with consumers who were paying for e-mail services they weren't getting.

Why? Maybe some lawyer persuaded AT&T Broadband executives that the company would be liable for failure to protect against a spam attack, but immune from damages resulting from equipment failure. Maybe some macho manager decided the truth was simply more embarrassing than the fiction the company concocted for customers. We'll never know for sure.

But clearly, AT&T management made a conscious decision to withhold the truth from customers, and that's the strangest thing of all. I doubt AT&T Broadband customers would have reacted with anything other than equanimity or mild annoyance to the challenge the company faced from the spam floods. We consumers pay hard-earned money for AT&T's services, and we have a right to demand honest accountability. When things go wrong, it's reasonable to expect accurate information. Not complete information, perhaps, not proprietary technical details, but certainly not cynical misinformation.

AT&T Broadband would do well to reconsider its communications policy. It can fail to provide less than "perfect information" once. Twice, and customers will begin shopping for competing broadband technologies.