AT&T will award $5 credits to consumers affected or potentially affected last week by an outage across the US because of the service disruption last week, the company said late on Saturday.
AT&T, whose 5G network covers about 290 million people across the US, grappled with interruptions to its service for more than 10 hours on Thursday. AT&T restored wireless service later that day, saying it believed the issue had been caused “by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network”. The company said on Saturday it was crediting affected consumers for the average cost of a full day of service.
“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.”
The Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday it was investigating the incident, while the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is working with AT&T to understand the cause. AT&T said on Thursday it did not believe a cyber attack caused the outage, rather a botched expansion of its network had disrupted services.
The outage affected people’s ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911, according to posts on the X social media platform by government departments in several US cities. In 2021, regulators settled for $19.5m an inquiry into a June 2020 T-Mobile outage that lasted over 12 hours and led to more than 20,000 failed 911 emergency calls.
