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AT&T (T) is in talks to acquire Lumen Technologies' (LUMN), consumer fiber operations, in a deal that could value the unit at more than $5.5 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Shares of Lumen were down more than 14% after the report.

The terms, which are not yet finalized, could change or the talks might still collapse, according to the report.

Both Lumen and AT&T declined to comment on Reuters requests.

The potential move to offload the fiber business, which provides high-speed internet services to residential customers, comes as Lumen is doubling down on the AI boom to power its near-term growth, while grappling with a rapid decline of its legacy business.

Lumen kicked off a process to sell its consumer fiber operations, Reuters reported in December.

The fiber-optic cable provider has over 1,700 wire centers across its total network, with consumer fiber available in about 400 of them.

In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate.

That person was Mark Klein, who died on March 8 this year from cancer. He was 79.

After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.

The evidence he gathered and shared led to two lawsuits that exposed the extent to which US citizens were being spied on by their own government in the post-9/11 world. Klein faced legal pressure, death threats, and the constant fear of ruin, to get his story out and tell the public what was going on. But Klein regretted nothing.

A while back, AT&T and TransUnion introduced a service called Branded Call Display to help people figure out if a business call was real or just another scam. When companies signed up for this feature, their name and logo would show up on your phone screen when they called.

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Soon, people will see the reason why a business is calling before they even pick up. You won’t have to download anything or tweak your settings—it’ll just show up automatically.

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Instead of just a company name, you might see messages like ‘delivery service,’ ‘refill reminder,’ or ‘patient callback’ when a business calls. If you ordered food, you’d instantly know it was your driver instead of some random unknown number.

This update is only rolling out to Android users for now since it’s part of the same Branded Call Display system. But according to James Garvert, a senior VP at TransUnion, this feature is likely to become available for all phones eventually.

AT&T agreed to pay a $13 million fine because it gave customer bill information to a vendor in order to create personalized videos, then allegedly failed to ensure that the vendor destroyed the data when it was no longer needed. In addition to the fine, AT&T agreed in a consent decree announced today by the Federal Communications Commission to stricter controls on sharing data with vendors.

In January 2023, years after the data was supposed to be destroyed, the vendor suffered a breach "when threat actors accessed the vendor's cloud environment and ultimately exfiltrated AT&T customer information," the FCC said. Information related to 8.9 million AT&T wireless customers was exposed.

Phone companies are required by law to protect customer information, and AT&T should not have merely relied on third-party firms' assurances that they destroyed data when it was no longer needed, the FCC said.

The data of nearly all customers of the telecommunications giant AT&T was downloaded to a third-party platform in a security breach, the company said Friday...

Approximately 109 million customer accounts were impacted, according to AT&T, which said that it currently doesn’t believe that the data is publicly available.

“The data does not contain the content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information,” AT&T said Friday.

The compromised data also doesn’t include some information typically seen in usage details, such as the time stamp of calls or texts, the company said, or customer names. AT&T, however, said that there are often ways using publicly available online tools to find the name associated with a specific telephone number...

AT&T identified the third-party platform as Snowflake and said that the incident was limited to an AT&T workspace on that cloud company’s platform and did not impact its network.

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With both industry leaders – AT&T and Verizon – on board, AST SpaceMobile is now uniquely positioned to achieve a groundbreaking feat: target 100% geographical coverage throughout the continental U.S., the most valuable wireless market in the world.

The key to unlocking this ubiquitous coverage lies in the power of the premium 850 MHz low-band spectrum, which offers superior signal penetration in the low band cellular range. AT&T and Verizon together will share with AST SpaceMobile a portion of their respective bands of 850 MHz low-band spectrum to enable nationwide satellite coverage.

AT&T is imposing $10 and $20 monthly price hikes on users of older unlimited wireless plans starting in August 2024, the company announced. The single-line price of these 10 "retired" plans will increase by $10 per month, while customers with multiple lines on a plan will be hit with a total monthly increase of $20.

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The $10 and $20 price increases "affect most of our older unlimited plans," AT&T said. The list of affected plans is as follows:

    AT&T Unlimited & More Premium
    AT&T Unlimited Choice Enhanced
    AT&T Unlimited & More
    AT&T Unlimited Choice II
    AT&T Unlimited Plus
    AT&T Unlimited Choice
    AT&T Unlimited Plan
    AT&T Unlimited Plus Enhanced
    AT&T Unlimited Value Plan
    AT&T Unlimited Plan (with TV)

The US government has provided more detail on how a former AT&T executive allegedly bribed a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza is set to go on trial in September 2024 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully influence then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in October 2022 in connection with the alleged illegal influence campaign and said it was "committed to ensuring that this never happens again."

US government prosecutors offered a preview of their case against La Schiazza in a filing on Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A contract lobbyist hired by AT&T "is expected to testify that AT&T successfully passed two major pieces of legislation after the company started making payments to Individual FR-1."

The Madigan ally referred to in the court document as "Individual FR-1" is former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a Chicago Tribune article notes. Acevedo, who was Madigan's assistant majority leader in the Illinois House before retiring in 2017, was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in 2022. Madigan left his House speaker post in 2021.

AT&T doesn't charge users extra to access its fastest 5G networks, but it soon may charge more to let people get priority access to its network during busier times. In an app update published in the iOS App Store on Monday, the company detailed a new add-on feature called "Turbo."

While the add-on did not appear accessible inside the updated app, a description alongside the update says that you can add "AT&T Turbo" to a line on your account which will "provide uninterrupted network speeds during peak traffic times." In short, pay more for better access to AT&T's network when it's busy.

A temporary network disruption that affected AT&T customers in the U.S. Thursday was caused by a software update, the company said.

AT&T told ABC News in a statement ABC News that the outage was not a cyberattack but caused by "the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network."

"We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve," the statement continued.

The software update went wrong, according to preliminary information from two sources familiar with the situation.

Sources have told ABC News that there was nothing nefarious or malicious about the incident.

The outage was not caused by an external actor, according to a source familiar with the situation. AT&T performs updates regularly, according to the source.