AT&T Outbound Texts Not Working Sept 2019

Regarding RingCentral Case 09433975

About a week ago our outbound text messaging from our RingCentral app to AT&T wireless customers stopped working. This has been confirmed by multiple users. All other carriers are receiving and sending text messages fine.

Initially (Sept 20th) when I talked with RingCentral support they checked the "logs" and said nothing is wrong and told me that I should have my customers call AT&T check their accounts. (Probably the most ridiculous suggestion ever). Only upon my insistence did the RingCentral support escalate the issue to "Tier 2 Support".

This morning (Sept 23) I received this message from Tier 2 Support: "We reviewed the logs for outbound

messages from (your number) it shows no errors over the past 24 hours. Looking back to the 21st I do show a number of errors labeled "Unknown error" on their side. Can you please retest the messages to the provided numbers and advise if the messages continue to fail at this time?"

I can confirm that I have tested AT&T numbers today and they are still not receiving my texts.

Please fix this issue as soon as possible as it has a major impact on our business operations.

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Update Sept 23 @ 530PM EST: After confirming with Tier 2 support and providing timestamps for failed outbound messages, they have "...forwarded it to our partner carrier. I will provide an update once available..."

We are actively looking at alternatives to RingCentral.

Happens often. Certain carriers will automatically ban VOIP numbers their systems flag to be sending SMS spam.

Update Sept 24: RingCentral "Tier 2" support is now tell me AGAIN that our customers must contact AT&T and report the number as "not spam". If that is not ridiculous enough, RingCentral does not give any instructions or contact numbers for doing so.

RingCentral I am very disappointed. You will take our business's money when there are no problems. But the minute something comes up and you have to actually fix a problem you want to put that back on my business and my customers. RingCentral you are not the cheapest service, and now I have no reason to stay because your service is obviously lacking also.

It is now working.

For people that run into this problem later, do not bother contacting RingCentral.

What ended up working for us? PAYING a customer that has AT&T mobile service to call AT&T and ask that the number be removed from the spam list. After getting transferred around a few times, AT&T did confirm to our customer that our number was blocked from sending texts to AT&T mobile customers. After some persistence, the customer was successful in getting the number taken off the list.

I did earlier talk with a "supervisor" at RingCentral, and reading between the lines it sounds like this happens all the time with RingCentral customers. Obviously not something RingCentral wants to advertise but super annoyed when they could have just been honest from the get-go that this is a common problem instead of acting like the whole time like this was a one-off.

On a side note, obviously these spam lists that the mobile carriers maintain are not going to stop the real spammers who can just call the phone company and be taken off the list. But it sure did waste a lot of our time (a non-spammer).

Well I spoke too soon. Came in yesterday morning and we are unable to text to AT&T numbers again. We probably sent 1-2 texts TOTAL to AT&T customers during the time that it was working again. I highly suspect this is a RingCentral/VOIP issue more than anything else.

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