WASHINGTON, June 20 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge granted

preliminary approval on Friday to a $177 million settlement that

resolves lawsuits against AT&T ( T ) over breaches in 2024 that

exposed personal information belonging to tens of millions of

the telecom giant's customers.

U.S. District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas said in a ruling

that the class-action settlement was fair and reasonable.

The deal resolves claims over data breaches that AT&T ( T )

announced in May and July last year. Depending on which breach

is involved, AT&T ( T ) has agreed to pay up to $2,500 or $5,000 to

customers who suffered losses that are "fairly traceable" to the

incidents. After payments are made for direct losses, the

remaining funds will be distributed to customers whose personal

information was accessed.

AT&T ( T ) did not immediately comment.

One of the incidents resulted in the illegal downloading of

about 109 million customer accounts at the U.S. wireless

company. AT&T ( T ) disclosed that its call logs were copied from its

workspace on a Snowflake cloud platform covering about

six months of customer call and text data from 2022 from nearly

all its customers.

In March 2024, AT&T ( T ) said it was investigating a data set

released on the "dark web" and said its preliminary analysis

showed it affected approximately 7.6 million current account

holders and 65.4 million former account holders. The company

said the data set appeared to be from 2019 or earlier.

The Federal Communications Commission is also

investigating. In September, AT&T ( T ) agreed to pay $13 million to

resolve an FCC investigation over a data breach of a cloud

vendor in January 2023 that impacted 8.9 million AT&T ( T ) wireless

customers.

The FCC said the data exposed in 2023 covered customers

from 2015 through 2017 that should have been deleted in 2017 or

2018.