Following a more than 10-hour outage impacting over 70,000 users early Thursday, AT&T has announced that affected customers will receive credits to compensate for the incident.
According to Reuters, the company deemed it was the appropriate course of action in response to the disruption.
AT&T Affected Customers to Receive Credit Due to the Outage
In a letter to employees, AT&T CEO John Stankey said that crediting customers "a full day of service" was "fully manageable," while achieving the company's business objectives and financial guidance set this year.
Service restoration occurred late Thursday on the 5G network, which covers approximately 290 million people across the United States. An initial investigation determined that the outage resulted from errors in the application and process execution used in expanding the network, dispelling any suspicions of a cyberattack.
"Outages sometimes have outsized impacts on some subscribers that may be greater than the face value of the credit... For that reason, I believe that crediting those customers for essentially a full day of service is the right thing to do," Stankey noted.
Automatic Credit to AT&T Affected Customers
ABC News reported that the $5 credit for each customer would be applied automatically in two billing cycles, while prepaid customers affected by the network outage would have options available, but AT&T did not elaborate on what those might be.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already launched an investigation into the incident. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is also working with AT&T to understand and determine the cause.
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