WASHINGTON — In response to a significant wireless outage that occurred earlier this week, AT&T has announced that it will be issuing billing credits to affected customers, the company confirmed late Saturday.
AT&T, a leading telecommunications company with a 5G network that spans across the United States and serves approximately 290 million people, experienced a service disruption that lasted for over 10 hours on Thursday.
The company managed to restore wireless service late on Thursday and attributed the issue to “the application and execution of an incorrect process” that was used during network expansion.
On Saturday, AT&T announced that it would be compensating affected customers by crediting them for the average cost of a full day of service. The company acknowledged the inconvenience caused by the outage and expressed regret for letting down its customers. “We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future,” the company added.
As of late Saturday, a company spokesperson was unable to provide an estimate of the number of customers affected by the outage.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stated on Thursday that it was investigating the incident. In addition, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is collaborating with AT&T to understand the cause of the outage. AT&T clarified on Thursday that it did not believe the outage was the result of a cyber attack.
The outage had serious implications, affecting people’s ability to reach emergency services by dialing 911, as reported by government departments in several U.S. cities.
In a similar incident in 2021, regulators settled a probe into a June 2020 T-Mobile outage that lasted over 12 hours and resulted in more than 20,000 failed 911 emergency calls, with a fine of $19.5 million. In that case, the FCC estimated that “over 250 million calls … from other service providers’ subscribers to T-Mobile subscribers failed due to the outage” and “at least 41% of all calls that attempted to use T-Mobile’s network during the outage did not complete successfully.”
Disagree – AT&T should have better contingency plans in place to prevent disruptions in the first place.
Disagree – This is a step in the right direction, but AT&T needs to focus on preventing service disruptions altogether.