AT&T to Offer Bill Credits After Widespread Outages

AT&T will begin offering customers bill credits for network outages.

The new program, announced Wednesday (Jan. 8) in a press release and set to go live Thursday (Jan. 9), comes after a year in which the telecom sector and its customers suffered a wave of disruptions.

For example, AT&T in February saw a nationwide outage that lasted over 12 hours, blocking over 92 million calls and preventing more than 25,000 911 calls, Reuters reported Wednesday. Rival networks Verizon and T-Mobile suffered similar outages, although these were more limited.

AT&T’s new program, the AT&T Guarantee, will offer credits to fiber customers who experience outages of 20 minutes or more and wireless customers who see disruptions of 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers, according to the press release.

“Consumers will automatically receive a bill credit equaling a full day of service, and we’ll reach out to our small business customers with options to help make it right,” AT&T said in the release.

The goal is to show customers that AT&T is dedicated to serving them and improving consumer and small business experiences, per the release.

“And if we fall short of this — we’re going to take action to make it right,” AT&T said in the release.

Reuters reported that Jenifer Robertson, executive vice president and general manager of AT&T Mass Markets and Mobility, said in an interview, “Four years ago, we were losing share in the industry for a significant period of time. We knew we had lost our customers’ trust.”

AT&T employed strategies such as pricing, product improvements and promotional offers to bring the company to growth, she said, per the report.

“Since 2019, we’ve invested more than $140 billion in our network and almost a billion dollars in customer care and operations…,” Robertson said in the AT&T press release.

AT&T’s outage wasn’t the only serious issue affecting the company last year. Weeks later, it revealed that it suffered a data breach that impacted about 7.6 million account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

The incident was one of several high-profile data breaches that happened last year. Joining it was the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare that caused billions of dollars in losses, and the breach of defenses at background check firm National Public Data that resulted in the theft of 2.9 billion people’s information.