What Can I Expect to Receive From AT&T's $177 Million Data Breach Settlement?

Don’t expect to walk away with a jackpot.

But if you are or were an AT&T customer, the telecom giant may well owe you a cut of a $177 million class action legal settlement. It stems from data breaches in recent years that could have put your Social Security number, birth date and other personal information at risk in the sketchy corridors of the internet. That’s the dark web, where criminals traffic in our data.

A Dallas federal district judge preliminarily approved the agreement.

Customers who may be eligible can expect to receive email and/or written notifications over the summer.

AT&T, which admitted no wrongdoing, expects final approval by the end of the year, with settlement payments likely to commence in early 2026.

For now, a final approval hearing is scheduled for December 3, 2025.

What is a class action?

Class actions are legal procedures that allow one or a small number of plaintiffs to pursue a case on behalf of a larger group or class of people. 

How much money you may receive in a case depends in part on the number of people who file a claim. Specifics on how and where to proceed with this AT&T settlement are pending.

Attorney fees reduce the size of the overall settlement.

“While we deny the allegations in these lawsuits that we were responsible for these criminal acts, we have agreed to this settlement to avoid the expense and uncertainty of protracted litigation,” AT&T said in a statement shared with AARP. “We remain committed to protecting our customers’ data and ensuring their continued trust in us.”

The attacks behind the breaches

The backstory: Last year, AT&T disclosed a cyberattack of a third-party cloud storage provider in which phone and text records from “nearly all” of AT&T’s cellular customers during a six-month period in 2022 were hacked. The stolen haul identified other phone numbers, including landlines, that an AT&T wireless number interacted with between May 1, 2022, and October 31, 2022, as well as on January 2, 2023. 

Hacked data from an even earlier incident dates to 2019 or before. That attack affected about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former customers

Just under a fifth, 19 percent, of AT&T’s current subscribers are older than 60, according to a weekly survey from telecom analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics in Dedham, Massachusetts. That compares to a little more than a fifth, 22 percent, of Verizon’s customers and about a sixth, 17 percent, of T-Mobile’s. 

As big as the AT&T settlement is, it pales in comparison to the massive $725 million Facebook parent Meta agreed in late 2022 to pay to settle a then five-year-old class action related to user privacy.