In case you’ve been living under a rock or your phone exploded two weeks ago, you probably were at least aware of, if not a victim of, last Tuesday’s major AT&T outage. AT&T mysteriously went down throughout the whole country for several hours, meaning AT&T users were, essentially, off the grid during that time.
The outage even affected AT&T’s FirstNet network that provides first responders priority access to the network at all times, so it was also a catastrophic development for some people. Now, AT&T wants to make things right by giving affected users an account credit for the inconvenience, though it’s likely not going to impress.
AT&T has announced that it will be giving “affected users” a $5 account credit. The company clarified that the outage was caused by the “application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network.”
In other words, some kind of migration or update was taking place, things went wrong, and everyone was affected by it. An inside source said during outage day that it was a server migration gone wrong, so this checks out.
Users of AT&T Wireless and AT&T Prepaid will be receiving the credit. The carrier says that the credit will be applied automatically, but we all know how that goes—if you don’t receive the credit within the next two billing cycles, you should definitely reach out.
$5 might not seem like a lot, but this is a compensation that’s coming to all AT&T Wireless and Prepaid users. AT&T serviced roughly 19.2 million prepaid users and 85.43 million postpaid users in the first quarter of 2023, so in total, AT&T would be spending at least $523.15 million to compensate users.
Unfortunately, this credit doesn’t seem to apply to Cricket users or AT&T Business users, but in the case of Business users, the carrier says it will “address their concerns” at a later date, whatever that means.
