AT&T settled a $177 million class-action lawsuit last year, agreeing to pay customers whose personal information was stolen in two data breaches. A Texas district court has since approved the settlement agreement on Oct. 2. However, even if you were impacted, this doesn't mean a windfall is coming your way.

In March 2024, AT&T announced that data belonging to approximately 73 million current and former customers had been found on the dark web. The data appeared to be from 2019 or earlier, and included personal information such as social security numbers .

Four months later in July, AT&T discovered a second major data breach. A bad actor had accessed AT&T's cloud server and downloaded records of customers' calls and texts, as well as their phone numbers. This breach impacted nearly every AT&T customer who used the telco's network between May 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, as well as some on Jan. 2, 2023.

Customers filed multiple class-action lawsuits against AT&T which were later combined.…