Business
AT&T to Reimburse Customers Impacted by Hours-Long Outage. Find Out If You Qualify
AT&T will reimburse some customers after a major hours-long cellular and internet outage Thursday.
The company said in a statement posted on its website that it will reach out to potentially impacted customers and automatically apply a $5 credit to each account—the estimated average cost of a full day of service.
The credits will typically be applied within two bill cycles. AT&T Wireless customers are eligible. The offer doesn’t apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket accounts (AT&T owns Cricket Wireless).
An AT&T spokesperson tells TIME in an email that its M04XFLTAuYVde5, Prepaid, and Cricket account holders are “valuable customers and we’ll have options available to them if they were potentially impacted by the outage,” but did not provide details. “We believe we have contacted potentially impacted customers, but if someone needs to talk to us about their situation, our call centers are available.”
In the statement announcing the compensation, AT&T apologized for the network outage.
“We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down,” the company said. “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.”
“We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them—anytime and anywhere,” the statement continued. “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.”
More than 70,000 customers were impacted by Thursday’s outages, according to downdetector.com. The most affected locations were Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, and New York City.
Customers first reported the outage around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday. AT&T acknowledged the issue in updates posted on its website at 11:15 a.m. ET and marked the situation as resolved roughly four hours later. The company said it believed the outage was caused by applying and executing the wrong process as it expanded its network.
Cricket saw a peak of 13,638 reports of outages, according to downdetector.com. It said on its website that the issue was resolved around two hours after publicly announcing it.
TIME reached out to Cricket to find out if there are any compensation plans.
On Thursday, a person who self-identified as a Cricket customer said on X (formerly Twitter) that they nearly missed work because they couldn’t use their mobile data for directions and asked for a free month of service.
Cricket Wireless’ account responded: “We might be able to provide a compensation once the outage ends. Our top priority now is to get this resolved as soon as possible.”
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