AT&T will offer a $5 credit to customers affected by a widespread outage Thursday caused by technical problems the company encountered while trying to expand its network, its CEO said Sunday.
The outage, which began around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time, temporarily cut connections for users across the United States.
Some of the cities affected were Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. according to Downdetector.comwhich tracks user reports of telecommunications and Internet outages.
At its peak, the site had received about 70,000 outage reports from AT&T. Service was fully restored after about seven hours.
“No matter the timing, one thing is clear: We disappointed many of our customers, including many of you and your families,” AT&T CEO John T. Stankey said. he wrote in a letter dated Sunday. “For that, we apologize.”
In an effort to “do the right thing,” AT&T is offering customers a $5 credit on their AT&T Wireless account. according to the company website.
“For the portion of consumers and small business customers most impacted by the disruption, we are automatically applying an account credit to compensate them for the inconvenience they experienced,” the company said.
It will take one or two billing cycles for the credit to appear, depending on when the customer's bill is closed, the company said.
Prepaid customers will have options available if they were affected, Stankey wrote, but he did not specifically identify those options.
AT&T also said it was “working closely” with mid-market and enterprise customers, which are business internet plans, to address their concerns.
It was not immediately clear how much the credits would amount to in lost revenue. No company representative could be reached on Sunday.
In a statement, AT&T emphasized that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.
“Our initial review of the cause of Thursday's outage indicates that it was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we worked to expand our network,” Stankey wrote in his letter.
The credit is intended to reimburse customers for the day they lost service, he wrote.
“I believe that crediting those customers with essentially a full day of service is the correct thing to do,” Stankey wrote.
