AT&T will pay a miserly $5 per account in outage compensation
Malcolm OwenAn AT&T logo on a building
AT&T will be providing bill credits to customers over the major February 22 outage, but the $5 credit will be paid on a per-account basis instead of per line.
On February 22, AT&T suffered from an outage that affected its cellular network across the United States. The outage meant many customers lost signal, with some iPhone owners seeing an option to use SOS via Satellite if necessary.
In an announcement on Saturday, AT&T confirmed it will compensate affected customers. However, that compensation may not be that much for some customers who have multiple lines on their account.
AT&T's Make it Right page apologizes for the outage, stating that the carrier is "proactively applying a credit" to accounts. The credit is claimed to be the "average cost of a full day of service."
The small print details that the compensation will be "One $5 credit per account" to AT&T Wireless users. While this is fairly suitable for accounts with one line, accounts with multiple lines will not receive multiple credits, just the single $5 addition.
AT&T also warns that the bill credits will be applied within two bill cycles, with most applied to the customers' next billing cycle.
Not everyone will get a credit, as Cricket and AT&T Prepaid are ruled out from compensation. AT&T Business customers are also not going to get the $5 credit, but the carrier says it will be offering some credits and will be working with Business customers on the matter.
AT&T explains that the outage was due to "the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network, not a cyber attack." It has not seen any evidence of any third-party intervention that caused the outage, and that customer data was not compromised during the event.
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22 Comments
I pay $40/mo. for my line, which is like $1.30/day. My service was out half a day. Five bucks seems decent, until I divide it by the 8 lines on my account.
I dumped AT&T 35 years ago with no regrets.
As Steve Martin would have said, "It's a profit deal."
While my own carrier would likely offer nothing better, I'm glad I'm not an AT&T customer.
After a two year class action lawsuit, who here thinks the customer would get any more than $5, while the lawyers pocket millions. I'll take my $5.