A pedestrian strolls in front of an AT&T place in New York.
Scott Mlyn|CNBC
The CEO of AT&T on Sunday excused the extensive cellular failure that knocked out service for countless consumers, stating some accounts will get credits to make up for the incident.Â
“For the portion of consumer and small business customers most impacted by the outage, we are automatically applying an account credit to compensate them for the inconvenience they experienced,” Chief Executive John Stankey composed in a letter to employees.Â
“We all know that our customers receive tremendous value and convenience for the nominal daily cost of our service, and outages sometimes have outsized impacts on some subscribers that may be greater than the face value of the credit. For that reason, I believe that crediting those customers for essentially a full day of service is the right thing to do,” he continued. “Despite that impact to the business, I believe this approach is fully manageable while achieving the 2024 business objectives we have set for ourselves and our stated financial guidance.” Â
Impacted consumers who prepay for their service will have “options” offered to them and the business is dealing with its mid-market and business consumers to resolve their issues, Stankey said.Â
Early Thursday, 10s of countless AT&T consumers throughout the U.S. reported extensive service failures and were not able to utilize their phones without access to WiFi. A spike in failures started around 4 a.m. ET and peaked at around 74,000 reported occurrences at 8: 30 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.
The failure raised issues that the business had actually possibly been struck with a cyberattack however a preliminary evaluation of the event discovered it was brought on by “the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network,” Stankey said.Â
“Teams worked hard to successfully normalize the network by around noon CT. No matter the timing, one thing is clear — we let down many of our customers, including many of you and your families. For that, we apologize,” he stated. “These challenges provide opportunities to identify key learnings that will make us better, and I can tell you that we have already implemented changes to prevent what happened on Thursday.”
Once the business recognized there was a blackout, it focused on bring back service to very first responders and reconnected staying consumers throughout the day. Stankey thanked personnel for their efforts in managing client grievances, interacting details about the failure and bring back service.
