OK everyone. Take a deep breath. This is obviously a voicemail server and software problem. It appears to occur with phone numbers whose area codes are clustered around North Carolina. I have a 336 area code and currently live in Phoenix. It doesn't matter; I have a cursed number and my mailbox resides on a cursed voicemail server. I call in on my or my wife's unlocked Nokia 3.1 or to the voicemail number from my house phone, still get "Service Not Available". Since Sept. 25. So what to do?
Take heart, all is not lost. There are things called Star Codes, which will allow you to forward your voice traffic to your home phone and answering machine. But even better, try out Youmail, freely downloadable from the google store. It will intercept your unanswered voice traffic and route it to their alternative voicemail server. It will then send you an alert on your phone and convert your voice messages to text so you can read them like email. It also allows you to play the original voicemail message. It sets you up with a personalized greeting for your callers to hear when you aren't available. This is a good temporary workaround until the vendor gets its act together. It will stop the bleeding and allow you to communicate with your contacts asynchronously again. You can easily reverse it when everything is fixed. The only negative is that it is unable to retrieve the messages we all have waiting for us, stored on the AT&T server. Those should come back when the vendor fixes their issue.
On a more philosophical note, I am an AT&T retiree and worked for them for over 28 years. I worked for the "Old" AT&T. Before divestiture, before the breakup, before the sale to SBC Communications and rebranding to the "New" AT&T. Eventually I was the victim of outsourcing and offshoring. In all that time, I have never seen a service outtage so badly handled, customer and tech support so badly informed, and customers so badly treated as this. So what got lost in the name of lower costs, innovation, and competition, was something we antiques used to call "The Spirit of Service" Today, nobody cares, nobody takes responsibility, and no one is held accountable. We are probably not talking to actual AT&T employees, just contractors. We customers are just numbers on a spreadsheet, and the daily migration between carriers is wistfully viewed as Churn. Keep complaining, take to social media, and call on Randall Stephenson. Someday they will realize that without customers, a good product, and a spirit of service, they will have nothing but a bad reputation and year over year losses.
