Were you affected by the AT&T outage that left customers unable to use their cellular service this past Thursday?
AT&T would like to make it right by issuing a $5 credit to your account.
That’s right. Five bucks. According to AT&T, that amount is the equivalent of one day of service on an average AT&T mobile plan.
“We recognize the frustration Thursday’s outage caused & know we let many of our customers down,” the official AT&T account posted on X. “To help make it right, we are applying a credit to potentially impacted accounts to help reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them – anytime and anywhere. It will take 1-2 billing cycles to see the credit, depending on when their bill closes.”
Why is your phone in SOS mode? U.S. cell services have faced outages all morning.
The company offered an apology on a webpage that was set up to provide customers with details of the credit offer titled “Making it right.” The mobile carrier said it’s taking steps to ensure a similar outage does not happen again in the future.
AT&T suffered a major outage on Thursday, affecting users all across the U.S. Some customers couldn’t use their cell service for 5 or more hours. The outage was so severe that AT&T customers’ experience began affecting downtime reports of various web services and other mobile carriers. Customers at companies like T-Mobile were reporting downtime due to their inability to call AT&T customers, unaware it wasn’t their service provider causing the issues.
The reaction to AT&T’s $5 credit has been mixed, with some customers appreciative of the offer and others noticing the various caveats to the offer.
$5 may seem like a fair credit to a customer on a single phone plan. However, according to a footnote on AT&T’s website for the offer, the $5 credit is per account, not per device. This means that an AT&T customer with multiple phone lines on their account will only receive a $5 credit in total.
In addition, the $5 credit will not apply at all to customers with an AT&T Business account or customers who use AT&T’s prepaid service. Customers of Cricket Wireless, a cellular provider owned by AT&T, will also not be eligible for the $5 credit.
AT&T customers do not have to do anything to receive the $5 credit if they are eligible. AT&T says the amount will be credited within one or two billing cycles.
