Early on Saturday, we told you about an AT&T subscriber who posted on “X” that she was refunded $52.50 because of the huge nationwide outage that AT&T subscribers had to deal with Thursday morning. We also suggested that AT&T subscribers had nothing to lose by asking for some amount of credit due to the outage which AT&T admitted was due to an incorrect process it used to expand its network.
Thursday afternoon AT&T said, “Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyberattack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.”
Reuters reported on Saturday night that AT&T will give billing credits to consumers impacted or “potentially” impacted by the outage. The nation’s third-largest wireless provider after leader Verizon and second-place T-Mobile, AT&T’s 5G signals cover 290 million Americans many of whom had to get through 10 hours without making or taking a call or sending and receiving a text. AT&T said on Saturday that it did not have an estimate of how many of its subscribers were affected by the outage.
AT&T will credit impacted subscribers for Thursday’s outage
AT&T said on Saturday, that it would give impacted customers credit for the average cost of a full day of wireless service. A company spokesman said, “We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down,” the company said. “We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
Several U.S. agencies are investigating the incident including the FCC and the the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The wireless provider has said that it does not believe that the outage was caused by a cyber attack.
Back in 2021, regulators reached a $19.5 million settlement with T-Mobile over an outage that lasted over 12 hours in June 2020 and resulted in more than 20,000 failed calls to 911. The FCC figured out that during that outage, over 250 million calls made to T-Mobile subscribers failed and 41% of the calls that used T-Mobile‘s network during the outage failed to connect successfully.
That is similar to what happened last Thursday when calls to AT&T subscribers from T-Mobile and Verizon customers failed to go through leading some Verizon and T-Mobile subscribers to report that their carrier’s network was also down when it was only AT&T’s network that experienced an issue.
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