The CEO of AT&T Inc. apologized Sunday for a long-running nationwide service outage that affected many of its wireless customers last week, and said it will credit the accounts of some of those affected as compensation .
In a letter to employees, CEO John Stankey called last Thursday’s outage “a challenging day.”
“We have failed many of our customers, including many of you and your families. For that we apologize,” she said.
Although there had been immediate concerns that AT&T T,
had been the victim of hackers, the company said late Thursday that the problem was caused by a software update, “not a cyber attack.”
Stankey did not specify how widespread the outage was, but said about 25% of its customers were unable to access the network as of 6 a.m. Eastern, with service fully restored by early afternoon.
Affected residential and small business customers will see an automatic credit to their account for a full day of service to compensate them for the inconvenience, Stankey said. Options for prepaid, mid-range and enterprise customers are still being worked out, she said.
Stankey said compensation “is the right thing to do” and that payments should be manageable within the company’s previously stated financial guidelines.
AT&T shares have been flat year to date and have fallen about 13% over the past 12 months, compared to the S&P 500’s SPX’s 7% gain this year and 28% gain over the past year.