David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – AT&T will provide bill payment credits to consumers affected or potentially affected by a significant wireless outage earlier this week due to an outage, the company said late on Saturday.
AT&T (NYSE:), whose 5G network covers about 290 million people across the United States, experienced service outages that lasted more than 10 hours on Thursday.
AT&T restored wireless service late Thursday, saying it believed the problem was caused by “the application and execution of an incorrect process used in expanding our network.”
AT&T said Saturday it will credit affected customers for the average cost of a full day of service.
“We recognize the disappointment this outage has caused and know we have let many of our customers down,” the company said. “We are also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
A company spokesman was unable to provide an estimate late Saturday on how many customers were affected by the outage.
The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it was investigating the incident and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was working with AT&T to understand the cause. AT&T said Thursday it does not believe the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
According to posts on social media platform X posted by government agencies in several US cities, the power outage has affected people’s ability to call 911 for emergency services.
In 2021, regulators agreed to pay $19.5 million to investigate a June 2020 T-Mobile outage that lasted more than 12 hours and resulted in more than 20,000 failed 911 calls.
In this case, the FCC estimates that “more than 250 million calls… from other service provider subscribers to T-Mobile subscribers failed due to the glitch” and “at least 41% of all calls that attempted to use T-Mobile’s network during shutdown did not complete successfully.”