‘Making it right’: AT&T to reimburse customers following network outage

After a massive network outage last week, AT&T announced it is reimbursing customers.

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“We apologize for Thursday’s network outage. We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down. 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,” AT&T said in a statement.

The company said that they are reaching out to customers that were impacted and applying a credit automatically to their accounts. The credit is expected to be about $5, according to CNN.

The credit won’t go to customers who use AT&T’s Business or Prepaid plans, according to CNN. It is also not applied for customers who have Cricket Wireless.

“For the portion of consumer and small business customers most impacted by the outage, we are automatically applying an account credit to compensate them for the inconvenience they experienced,” Chief Executive John Stankey wrote in a letter to employees obtained by CNBC.

“We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them – anytime and anywhere. We’re crediting them for the average cost of a full day of service,” AT&T said.

The outage began around 4 a.m. on Thursday and continued until about 2 p.m. Soon after the outage began, thousands of AT&T customers began reporting issues with calling, texting and accessing the internet on their mobile devices.

At one point, more than 74,000 AT&T customers reported outages on DownDetector, a site that culls customer complaints about digital services.

Several local governments said on Thursday that the outage was causing disruptions in emergency services calls, however, an AT&T spokesman said the company’s FirstNet network, used for those services, remained operational despite the outage, CNN reported.

The company said in a statement that the outage was not a cyberattack but caused by “the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.”

AT&T’s 5G network covers around 290 million people across the United States.

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