AT&T plans to credit the accounts of customers impacted by this week’s nationwide outage in its cellular service, the company officials said Saturday.
The Dallas-based telecommunications giant apologized in a statement for Thursday’s disruption, which impacted tens of thousands of customers as well as those with other cellular carriers who attempted to reach AT&T users.
“We recognize the frustration this outage caused and know we let many of our customers down,” company officials wrote in a statement on AT&T’s website. “We understand this may have impacted their ability to connect with family, friends and others. Small business owners may have been impacted, potentially disrupting an essential way they connect with customers.”
Officials said in the statement that they want “to help make it right” by automatically applying a credit to impacted customers’ accounts. According to the company, each customer will receive one $5 credit on their AT&T Wireless account — the equivalent of what officials say is the average cost of a full day of cellular service.
The credit doesn’t apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket, company officials said, and it will typically be applied within two bill cycles.
Reports of the outage began about 2 a.m. Thursday. By 8:15 a.m. over 73,000 customers reported cellular outages to Downdetector.com, which tracks disruptions to services.
The outage also disrupted FirstNet, AT&T’s emergency response network.
By 2 p.m., AT&T had fully restored wireless service to all customers, officials said. Speculation fueled initially on why wireless subscribers lost service, with some pinning the disruptions on powerful solar flares. Federal agencies were investigating the disruption.
The company later blamed the incident on an error in coding.
“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 cyber attack,” an AT&T spokesperson said.
In the Saturday statement, company officials said they’re taking steps to prevent this from happening again, but did not elaborate.
“Our priority is to continuously improve and be sure our customers stay connected,” AT&T officials wrote.
