Worst technical support ever

Today my Uverse Internet goes down... again. This is a constant problem, at least once a week. Usually power-cycling my modem fixes the problem. Not today.

So I call their "help line." I talk to a sweet Indian woman who tries really really hard to sound American. I tell her my Internet is not working. After less than 3 minutes of "trouble shooting" she "punts" on the issue and tells me I need to be home between 4pm and 8pm on Monday for a technician to come out to fix my problem. I tell her that is unacceptable. She has nothing else to offer in the way of actual "help." She has clearly decided she does not want to help me.

So I hangup and do some more digging on my end. I try to reach any website, and it seems like AT&T's Uverse DNS servers are not resolving. So I switch my laptop's DNS entries from the default (ATT Uverse DNS) to Google's DNS, and BAM! It instantly works.

That tells me that ATT's Uverse DNS servers are down.

So I *think* this is information that AT&T might need to know. Wow, was I wrong! I start a chat session with some tech support guy supposedly called "Prince," but he's probably another dude in India working at 3am.

I start the chat and tell him that AT&T's DNS servers are not working. He proceeds to ask me if I restarted my modem. I say that doesn't matter, AT&T's DNS servers are down. He tells me he has checked with his "network team" and there is nothing wrong with the DNS servers. I tell him they are lying to him and / or they didn't do a full test. Likely, they just "pinged" the servers and saw that they were "up" and decided that was "good enough."

"Prince" continues to ignore my diagnosis of the problem. He then tells me that the "network team" has "pushed" some updates to my modem, and that I must restart it. I ask him what settings they changed. He doesn't know. Reluctantly, I reboot the modem. Absolutely NO CHANGE, because again, AT&T's DNS servers are down. I disconnect the chat after telling "Prince" he was of no help and should learn to listen to customers. Sure, most people are not tech-savvy, and tech support people should those people, but when someone has a specific concern such as "your DNS servers are down," they should take that seriously.

Then I start Googling and find a service that logs problems with ISPs. As I suspected, there are hundreds of people on that website in Southern California posting that their DNS servers on ATT Uverse are down. Thanks for nothing, "Prince."

So, just for the heck of it, I call back ATT "customer service." Suddenly, the wait time has gone from nothing to over 15 minutes due to "unusually high call volumes." Gosh, if only "Prince" had listened to me... Or if the first "customer service" lady had not just "punted" my problem to a technician appointment, they could have discovered the issue 30 minutes earlier.

I wait on hold for 15+ minutes. During that time, some other dude from India follows up with me via phone on my less that stellar interaction with "Prince." He asks me what the root of my problem was, and I tell him that I already knew AT&T Uverse was having a DNS outage, and Prince just completely ignored me. This Indian dude's accent it very VERY heavy, and I can't understand half of what he is saying. He says something like "we just got a service bulletin for your area that there is a DNS problem." That just makes me more angry, because that is EXACTLY what I was telling "Prince" 30 minutes earlier, and he ignored me. I just hang up on that dude.

I finally get connected to the call that was on hold for 20 minutes, and I ask the nice Indian lady there, "how long will your DNS servers in Southern California be down?" She tells me she doesn't know what that means, but she can run a "diagnostic test" on my line. I tell her "my line" is perfectly OK, and that AT&T's DNS servers are down in my area. She says she doesn't know what that means, and she has no way of finding out. I hang up on her as well.

So, at this point, after $200 in "hidden" service start-up fees, a modem which will not "bridge" to my awesome, expensive, highly customizable wireless router, constant service outages and ill-equipped, ignorant "technical service" representatives who ignore everything you tell them, I'm canceling this terrible, terrible company and Uverse service forever.

You just lost another customer, AT&T Uverse. You could have saved this account if you actually LISTENED to your customers.