AT&T rant continued....

This is hilarious.
According to the AT&T paid mouth, it was difficult for them to notify customers about the outage because the service was allegedly only sporadically affected. In the same statement, the mouth attributes the problems to a power outage in a specific area.
Hmmm. So, you can pinpoint it, but you can't tell folks about it. Interesting.
This problem shouldn't have happened in the first place. The tomfoolery is compounded by the lack of any specific communication to the public in a decent amount of time.
Make no mistake, AT&T knows, or at least should know, which customers would be affected by this type of outage. It should be a simple matter to say, "AT&T customers in (insert cities and states here) may experience (insert types of service disruption) due to a commercial power outage at our facility in (insert location here). We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any trouble this has caused."
Simple. See?
Yet by not explaining, the company only creates more questions.
That is, it creates questions for those few who actually care to ask.