AT&T CEO says some prospects will obtain credit for outage

The CEO of AT&T on Sunday apologized for the widespread cellular outage that knocked out service for 1000’s of consumers, saying some accounts will obtain credit to compensate for the incident. 

“For the portion of consumer and small business customers most impacted by the outage, we are automatically applying an account credit to compensate them for the inconvenience they experienced,” Chief Govt John Stankey wrote in a letter to employees. 

“We all know that our customers receive tremendous value and convenience for the nominal daily cost of our service, and outages sometimes have outsized impacts on some subscribers that may be greater than the face value of the credit. For that reason, I believe that crediting those customers for essentially a full day of service is the right thing to do,” he continued. “Despite that impact to the business, I believe this approach is fully manageable while achieving the 2024 business objectives we have set for ourselves and our stated financial guidance.” 

Impacted prospects who prepay for his or her service may have “options” accessible to them and the corporate is working with its mid-market and enterprise prospects to deal with their considerations, Stankey mentioned. 

Early Thursday, tens of 1000’s of AT&T prospects throughout the U.S. reported widespread service outages and had been unable to make use of their telephones with out entry to WiFi. A spike in outages started round 4 a.m. ET and peaked at round 74,000 reported incidents at 8:30 a.m. ET, in line with Downdetector.

The outage raised considerations that the corporate had doubtlessly been hit with a cyberattack however an preliminary assessment of the incident discovered it was brought on by “the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network,” Stankey mentioned. 

“Teams worked hard to successfully normalize the network by around noon CT. No matter the timing, one thing is clear — we let down many of our customers, including many of you and your families. For that, we apologize,” he mentioned. “These challenges provide opportunities to identify key learnings that will make us better, and I can tell you that we have already implemented changes to prevent what happened on Thursday.”

As soon as the corporate realized there was an outage, it prioritized restoring service to first responders and reconnected remaining prospects all through the day. Stankey thanked workers for his or her efforts in dealing with buyer complaints, speaking details about the outage and restoring service.