AT&T is donating more than $1.2 million to support seven small businesses focused on distance learning programs, as the coronavirus outbreak forces students to continue their studies at home.
"When you think about small businesses, they are the most at-risk businesses in America today," Mo Katibeh, CMO and EVP of AT&T Business, told Cheddar. "Some estimates show that up to 25 percent of small businesses, over 2 million of them, could face material cash challenges or could even go out of business."
The company has set up a larger $10 million fund to provide resources for educators, parents, and students to help continue their education while schools are shut down.
The fund has supported nonprofits and companies, such as the online tutoring service Khan Academy, to expand their free education resources.
"This isn't new with COVID, but we've doubled down on our efforts with this $10 million grant and the [$1.2 million] we're announcing today," Katibeh said.
This charitable effort was launched amid a massive shift at AT&T to accommodate a decreased demand from business customers and an increase from residential consumers.
"The network is handling this shift in traffic from work locations to home locations extremely well," Katibeh said.
The company's core network is up 25 percent. That's over 400 petabytes of traffic per day, which is equivalent of 50 million filing cabinets filled with paper, Katibeh said.
There has also been a 300 percent uptick in traffic related to collaboration tools for businesses and education facilities such as Zoom and Google Hangouts.
AT&T has made a concerted effort to appear engaged with coronavirus relief, including scrapping its plans for $4 billion stock buybacks.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
