INDIANAPOLIS — AT&T has blamed its nationwide network outage Thursday, Feb. 22 on an error in coding, without elaborating. Now, the company is looking to compensate those who were affected.
Shortly before 9:30 p.m. Feb. 24, AT&T posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that it will apply a credit to potentially impacted accounts "to help reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them - anytime and anywhere."
On the AT&T website, the company said a $5 credit per account will be applied to accounts within two billing cycles, depending on when their bill closes. According to AT&T, $5 is the average cost for a full day of service.
"We’re also taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. Our priority is to continuously improve and be sure our customers stay connected," AT&T said in a statement.
As many as 73,000 AT&T customers reported incidents, according to Downdetector, with the number of those affected likely much higher. The carrier is the country's largest, with more than 240 million subscribers.
"Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack," the Dallas-based company said Thursday night.
During the outage, some iPhone users saw SOS messages displayed in the status bar on their cellphones. The message indicates that the device is having trouble connecting to their cellular provider’s network, but it can make emergency calls through other carrier networks, according to Apple Support.
The Federal Communications Commission contacted AT&T about the outage, and the Department of Homeland Security and FBI were also looking into it, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.