AT&T Inc.'s CEO apologized Sunday for an hours-long, nationwide outage that affected many of its wireless customers last week, and said he would credit the accounts of some affected as compensation.
In a letter to employees, CEO John Stankey described last Thursday's outage as a “challenging day.”
“We have let many of our customers down, including many of you and your families. For that, we apologize.”
While there were immediate concerns that AT&T T,
The company said late Thursday that the issue was due to a software update, “not a cyberattack.”
Stankey did not specify how widespread the outage was, but said about 25% of its customers were unable to access the network starting around 6 a.m., with service fully restored by early afternoon.
Affected consumer and small business customers will receive an automatic account credit for a full day of service to compensate them for the inconvenience, Stankey said. Options for prepaid, mid-market and enterprise customers are still being researched, he said.
Stankey said the compensation “is the right thing to do,” and that the payments should be manageable within the company's previously announced financial guidance.
AT&T shares have been flat year to date and are down about 13% over the past 12 months, compared with the S&P 500's SPX index's 7% gain this year and 28% rise over the past year.
