HOUSTON — AT&T had a network outage last week that left tens of thousands of customers without service for hours and now the company said they want to make things right with a credit.
According to the carrier, they’re giving a credit of $5 per account for customers who were potentially affected by Thursday’s outage. The exact language on the AT&T website is "One $5 credit per account on your AT&T Wireless account." According to a message on the AT&T website, $5 is the average cost of a full day of service.
AT&T said credits are typically applied within two billing cycles and applies to AT&T Wireless accounts. It does not apply to AT&T business, AT&T prepaid or Cricket. You can read their full message here.
The carrier said they're taking steps to keep this from happening again.
Cause of the AT&T outage
AT&T blamed the incident on an error in coding, without elaborating.
“Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” the Dallas-based company said Thursday.
Outage tracker Downdetector noted that outages, which began at about 2:30 a.m. CT, peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. AT&T had more than 58,000 outages around noon ET, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The carrier is the country's largest, with more than 240 million subscribers.
By 8 p.m. ET, the reports on AT&T's network were fewer than 1,000.
Reaction to credit offered by AT&T
When AT&T posted their message about the credit to X, formerly Twitter, customers reacted, many saying that the credit doesn’t match the inconvenience. (You can see all of the reactions under the post from AT&T on X.)
There were some positive reactions to the news.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.