Are you an AT&T customer who was impacted by last week’s outage that saw its network down for a good part of the day on Thursday? You may get a bill credit soon. Late last night, AT&T announced a one-time $5 credit for some of its customers impacted by the outage.
In a statement on its site, AT&T said:
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.
To help make it right, we’re reaching out to potentially impacted customers and we’re automatically applying a credit to their accounts. 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.
We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. Our priority is to continuously improve and be sure our customers stay connected.
The catch is this bill credit only applies to AT&T Wireless accounts not AT&T Busniesss or AT&T Prepaid customers. That also means Cricket customers are not included in this offer.
For AT&T, this means it will pay $5 to its over 87 million postpaid wireless customers. Its 19 million prepaid and 7 million reseller customers are not included in this offer. The only catch is this is $5 per account not per line.
AT&T’s outage follows another widespread service disruption last month from Verizon Wireless, although AT&T’s problem appears to have affected more areas. While not frequent, these sorts of outages happen and cause massive disruption considering how dependent we all are on our phones.
The outage was large enough that Downdetector also saw spikes in reports on Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile’s services, but those companies blamed calls made to AT&T users.
On Thursday, a Verizon spokesman confirmed its network was fully operational. “Some customers may have experienced issues this morning when calling or texting those served by another carrier. Our network continues to function normally,” he said.
“We did not experience an outage,” said a T-Mobile spokeswoman. “Our network is operating normally. Down Detector is likely reflecting challenges our customers were having attempting to connect to users on other networks.”
Those affected saw SOS symbols on their phones. While iPhones are supposed to call 911 in SOS mode, if you’re phone is off of the cellular network, it’s suggested you move to a Wi-Fi network instead.
If you qualify for this credit, AT&T says you will see it applied to your account within 2 bill cycles.
Update: AT&T contacted Cord Cutters News to say the early reported cost of this was less than what was stated. This is because AT&T is paying just $5 per account not $5 per line.
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