Key Takeaways
- AT&T said it would reimburse customers a full day of service for the carrier’s more than 10-hour outage on Thursday last week.
- Chief Executive John Stankey said in a letter to the employees Sunday that the company’s 2024 business objectives will be achievable even with the credit given to affected customers.
- Stankey said the outage was due to an “incorrect process” used when the company was working at expanding its network.
AT&T (T) said it would reimburse customers a full day of service for the carrier’s more than 10-hour outage last week, saying it was the “right thing to do.”
“For the portion of consumers 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 said in a letter to employees Sunday.
The one-time credit doesn’t apply to AT&T business or accounts through prepaid services such as Cricket Wireless, although the latter “will have options available to them if they were impacted,” he noted. He also said that AT&T’s 2024 business objectives will be achievable even with the credit given to the affected customers.
Stankey said the outage was due to an “incorrect process” used when the company was working at expanding its network. The outage had blocked calls to 911 emergency services.
Still, Stankey said he couldn’t rule out an outage like this happening again.
“This is not our first network outage, and it won’t be our last—unfortunately, it’s the reality of our business,” he said.
AT&T shares were trading down 0.7% at 10:07 a.m. ET time. They are down 14% in the past year.