AT&T will pay a miserly $5 per account in outage compensation
AT&T will be providing bill credits to customers over the major February 22 outage, but the $5 credit will be paid on a per-account basis instead of per line.
An AT&T logo on a building
On February 22, AT&T suffered from an outage that affected its cellular network across the United States. The outage meant many customers lost signal, with some iPhone owners seeing an option to use SOS via Satellite if necessary.
In an announcement on Saturday, AT&T confirmed it will compensate affected customers. However, that compensation may not be that much for some customers who have multiple lines on their account.
AT&T's Make it Right page apologizes for the outage, stating that the carrier is "proactively applying a credit" to accounts. The credit is claimed to be the "average cost of a full day of service."
The small print details that the compensation will be "One $5 credit per account" to AT&T Wireless users. While this is fairly suitable for accounts with one line, accounts with multiple lines will not receive multiple credits, just the single $5 addition.
AT&T also warns that the bill credits will be applied within two bill cycles, with most applied to the customers' next billing cycle.
Not everyone will get a credit, as Cricket and AT&T Prepaid are ruled out from compensation. AT&T Business customers are also not going to get the $5 credit, but the carrier says it will be offering some credits and will be working with Business customers on the matter.
AT&T explains that the outage was due to "the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network, not a cyber attack." It has not seen any evidence of any third-party intervention that caused the outage, and that customer data was not compromised during the event.
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Comments
While my own carrier would likely offer nothing better, I'm glad I'm not an AT&T customer.
However it is in their best interest from a customer relations standpoint. Remember that AT&T is no longer a monopoly. Their customers have alternatives (Verizon, T-Mobile).
Realistically though this was done to thwart a massive class action lawsuit which certainly would come had they just shrugged and said "too bad."
They can pay $5 per account now or end up probably paying the same amount in 6-7 years after spending millions on legal fees and enduring lots of hatred and subscriber churn.
What do you do if you were AT&T senior management?
The class action is probably in the works though the judge should throw it out immediately since AT&T has proactively handed out the $5 credit which is about what a class action suit would have yielded.
However, accounts are NOT customers. The 7 people on my acct all lost service. Aren’t they entitled to some form of relief? Each of those lines run $35/mo.
Even if the compensation is a paltry $5 per line, that would seem to be a fair preemptive arrangement and reduce the likelihood of a class action settlement significantly more than the $5 per acct.
That is not a payment, it's a very cheap sounding credit.
I am also switching to AT&T Fiber. I was getting ready to do so, and when Spectrum decided that the absolute best time to upgrade their network was during the day on a week day, I called AT&T right then and there. I'm getting 3 times the bandwidth for less than half the cost.