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AT&T recognizes ‘frustration,’ offers customers $5 credit following hours-long nationwide outage

The company logo hangs over the door to a AT&T telephone store Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) (David Zalubowski, Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Following an hours-long nationwide outage last week, AT&T apologized to all of its impacted customers, recognized their frustration and offered them a $5 credit toward their account, according to a statement written on the company’s website.

Read the full statement from AT&T:

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We apologize for Thursday’s network outage. We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down. We understand this may have impacted their ability to connect with family, friends, and others. Small business owners may have been impacted, potentially disrupting an essential way they connect with customers.

To help make it right, we’re reaching out to potentially impacted customers and we’re proactively applying a credit* to their accounts. We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them – anytime and anywhere. We're crediting them for the average cost of a full day of service.

We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. Our priority is to continuously improve and be sure our customers stay connected.

At the bottom of the page, written in very small font, there’s a sentence indicating customers will get one $5 credit per AT&T Wireless account.

Thousands of Americans dealt with cellular outages on AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Verizon, T-Mobile and other service providers on Thursday, according to data from Downdetector.

At around 4 p.m. AT&T announced its wireless service was restored for all the affected customers. The wireless carrier said a software update was the reason behind the outage.

“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future,” AT&T wrote.

At its highest point, AT&T had more than 74,000 outages around 8:10 a.m. ET, in locations including Jacksonville, Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The outages began at approximately 3:30 a.m. ET. The carrier is the country’s largest with more than 240 million subscribers.

Now, the phone company said the incident was being investigated by the FBI, Homeland Security and the FCC.


About the Author
Marcela Camargo headshot

Marcela joined News4JAX in 2023. She grew up in Mexico and eventually moved to California to pursue her dream of becoming a journalist. Now, she is a proud San Diego State University alumna who has many years of experience in TV and digital journalism.

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