Dish Network Is Still A Hot Mess With 14 Hour Hold Times A Month After Major Cyberattack

Failures

from the not-very-good-at-this-whole-business-thing dept

Dish Network remains a bit of a hot mess a month after a cyberattack effectively wiped the company off the face of the internet and disrupted most of the wireless and TV company’s internal systems.

If you recall, it took the better part of a week before Dish even acknowledged to its users that anything had happened. Customers say they still face hold times as long as fourteen hours when they call to try and get help from the company. Many users still say Dish never even notified them that there had been an intrusion. And efforts to get a hold of anyone at Dish remains a challenge:

After spending six hours waiting to speak to customer service, with one brief conversation with a representative who transferred the call to another department, Susan McClendon gave up for the day and decided to call again first thing Saturday morning. That went even worse, she said.

“I got the message that says, ‘Our call volume is unusually high.’ It says, ‘Your wait time is 847 minutes,’” she said. “That’s over 14 hours.”

Other outlets say users continue to have problems accessing their accounts, or logging into streaming services like HBO Max that they’ve purchased through Dish Network or its own streaming service, Sling TV.

The attack came at a tricky point for a company that was already on the ropes. You might recall that Dish Network is the company tasked with building a shiny new 5G network as part of a doomed Trump era fix for the competitive problems caused by the Sprint T-Mobile merger.

We noted at the time the plan was less of a real plan, and more of a performance to justify regulatory approval and sector consolidation, and the Trump FCC rubber-stamped the deal without reading it.

But efforts to actually build a working commercial 5G network at any real scale have been an ugly mess from the start, and having the company’s internal systems lobotomized by an intruder certainly isn’t going to help the company meet its FCC-monitored network deployment milestones, or gin up interest for a fledgling 5G network that was already an underwhelming mess.

I still strongly suspect Dish puts on a good show for the FCC for another year or two, but then effectively gives up, offloads its massive spectrum holdings at appreciated value, letting CEO Charlie Ergen skip off into the sunset on a big pile of money with little in the way of meaningful regulatory repercussion.

Filed Under: consolidation, cyberattack, fcc, privacy, satellite tv, security, streaming, wireless
Companies: dish network