AT&T apologizes for service outage

On Feb. 22, AT&T, Cricket Wireless, and a few other cellular retailers brought some people’s communications to a screeching halt for a few hours at the end of last month. It left a few people with an SOS symbol, not allowing calls or texts to be made without the use of Wi-Fi for as many as 12 hours in some cases. Others, however, were completely unaffected by the outage, with extremely little rhyme or reason to who was affected or why. Worldwide retailer AT&T sent out an apology for the day’s outage on Feb. 29. People across the nation experienced network issues. With this widespread outage, people couldn’t even dial 911 for emergency services. AT&T asked those who experienced this disturbance to call 911 from a landline. They stressed to folks to not test their service issues by calling or texting 911. Now, AT&T is offering a $5 credit to those who were potentially affected by the outage. They released a statement and said the credit is the “average cost of a full day of service.”

“We apologize and recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know that we let many of our customers down,” the statement read. “To help make it right, we’re applying a credit for potentially impacted accounts to help reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them anytime and anywhere.”

This credit, however, will not be applied to customers that are under AT&T’s business or prepaid plans as well as those who have Cricket Wireless accounts. AT&T also released an update assuring customers that the outage was not a result of a cyber-attack.

“Based on our initial review, we believe that (Thursday’s) outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network,” the update said. “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.”

The Federal Communications Commission is still investigating the incident, according to an article from CNN. News Science magazine attributed the outage to higher than usual solar flaring from our sun that week, and still others speculated on everything from magnetics to electricidal energy surges. Fact is, none were much better than educated guesses, as no one could definitively identify the source of the problem.