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AT&T has offered account credits for customers most impacted by their Feb. 22 outage, which left three quarters of AT&T customers unable to access services on Thursday morning of last week
An initial review of AT&T’s massive outage on Feb. 22 has revealed the apparent cause, according to AT&T CEO John Stankey, who addressed the outage in a letter to employees over the weekend.
Stankey wrote that the outage “was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network.”
He called it a “challenging day” for AT&T.
“Moments like these are a test of resilience,” Stankey wrote. “This is not our first network outage, and it won’t be our last – unfortunately, it’s the reality of our business. What matters most is how we react, adapt, and improve to deliver the service our customers need and expect.”
As a result of the outage, Stankey announced that AT&T would automatically apply account credits to consumers and small businesses most impacted by the outage and said AT&T’s prepaid customers “will have options available to them if they were impacted.”
Additionally, Stankey said AT&T is in discussions with the company’s mid-market and enterprise customers. He committed to addressing their concerns “as those discussions take place.”
Stankey’s letter, dated Feb. 25, stated that the outage began in the early morning hours of Thursday, Feb. 22, with about 75 percent of the company’s customers unable to access services in the hours that followed.
“We prioritized FirstNet service restoration, in line with our commitment to our nation’s first responders,” Stankey’s letter stated.”The remaining customers were reconnected throughout the morning.”
Stankey said AT&T was able to successfully stabilize the network by around noon time on Thursday. He thanked the company’s employees for working to resolve the issue.
“Whenever a challenging or unexpected event impacts this company, I can always count on everyone to rise to the occasion and the last few days have been no exception,” Stankey wrote. “Our frontline employees demonstrated expertise under pressure as our network teams took immediate action to restore service for our customers.”
In total, AT&T provides services to more than 100 million families across the United States and over 2.5 million businesses, according to a summary of the company’s operations provided by AT&T.
This story was originally published on Total Telecom’s sister site, Broadband Communities
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