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Customers and employees alike are complaining about AT&T's restructurings. Whereas customers complain of lower quality services because of cost reduction measures at the firm, employees are upset over the management's unpredictable and changing plans. And after years of reliability in the 1970s and 1980s, the firm's long-distance services have experienced major outages four times within 1990 and 1991. Inexperienced technical support is a typical complaint cited by customers, and workers complain because of abrupt facility shutdowns and transfers. AT&T's troubles have been a benefit to competitors such as Northern Telecom Co, which has overtaken AT&T's lead as switching equipment supplier. Some analysts believe AT&T's problems may relate to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) ceiling on price setting, which keeps customer prices down but encourages AT&T to reduce overhead. Others believe the firm has lost close contact with its clients because of its regional network consolidation.

On the day AT and T offers discounts averaging 33 percent off normal long-distance rates to atone for its Jan 15 breakdown - on Valentine's Day, Feb 14, 1990 - the company also provides an overview of what happened that afternoon. The crisis, which resulted in less than half the long-distance calls being completed, was the worst in AT and T's history and was caused by the omission of a few lines of code on some switching software. After hours of searching engineers were able to find the faulty coding and design a simple patch enabling the system to get up and running again. The problem was with software that directs calls from one switching center to another to optimize the speed with which calls are completed. The software failed to include instructions for signalling the system when switching computers were done with one operation and ready for another.