If you live in the United States, it was almost impossible not to hear the news of a massive network outage for AT&T users that happened recently, leaving them unable to use cellular services like phone calls, texts, and browsing the web. It took some time, but the outage was fixed the same day.
Of course, with inconvenience on such a major scale, it isn't surprising that AT&T has made the decision to credit their customers as compensation for the inconvenience caused by the outage that they faced.
Customers Will Be Compensated For A Full Day Of Service
If you're an AT&T user, you must have been incredibly frustrated on February 22nd, when AT&T's network faced a nationwide outage leaving customers' SIM cards essentially useless and unable to do anything. Well, the company has recognized their fault and has decided to compensate customers.
The company has said that it will credit its customers for a full day of service due to the inconvenience, which lasted for about 11 hours. That comes to $5, and the credit will be applied automatically for postpaid customers, while affected prepaid customers may need to explore other provided options.
There was no indication as to how many AT&T users would end up being credited, but the network giant said they'd be “reaching out to potentially impacted customers”, so that's likely to be in hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions of people.
AT&T's Outage On Thursday Was Reported By More Than 70,000 Users
AT&T is the biggest wireless network in North America, so needless to say, their outage was bound to have impacted potentially millions of people in the United States. It was first reported around 4 AM EST and was only restored by 3 PM EST, which is likely to have caused severe inconvenience in most people's daily lives.
The website DownDetector, used to report potential outages on online platforms, had more than 70,000 users report issues. Since you need to actually know about the website and report an outage yourself, that number is certainly only a marginal fraction of the people who faced issues with their AT&T connectivity.
Fortunately, the company ultimately reported that the outage was not due to a cyberattack as many people might have feared (your personal information is still safe), but due to an error on the company's part. Regardless, the scale of the outage has still prompted an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). We hope that the results of the investigation will make it less likely for such to happen in the future.
Did The Outage Extend To Other Wireless Networks?
There were no outages of a similar scale reported by users of other major US networks like T-Mobile and Verizon. Some users did report outages — there were over 1,000 reports logged on DownDetector — but both companies released statements to confirm that their networks were fully operational.
The reports may have been a result of T-Mobile or Verizon customers attempting to contact or text AT&T users and finding themselves unable to.
