- AT&T offered compensation to customers affected by the network outage
- The company blamed the outage on a ‘software problem’ that caused 70,000 phones to fail
AT&T has finally offered compensation to customers affected by the network outage that knocked out at least 70,000 phones.
The company earlier this week blamed the outage on a “software update error” while expanding network coverage.
However, there was speculation that the issue may have been the result of a cyber attack, but the company said there was “no evidence of malicious activity.”
Both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are investigating.
A $5 credit will be applied to the accounts of affected customers, the company said Saturday.
The company blamed the outage on a “software update issue” as it expanded its network coverage
AT&T, led by CEO John Stankey, has offered compensation to those affected by the outage
‘We apologize for Thursday’s network outage. “We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we have let many of our customers down,” AT&T said in a statement
“To make up for this, we are contacting potentially affected customers and automatically applying a credit to their accounts.
They added: ‘We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to connecting them reliably – anytime, anywhere.’
The outage was first reported in the early hours of Thursday morning when customers were unable to make emergency calls, with multiple 911 centers reporting users were unable to connect.
There were reports that other networks were affected, but this was believed to be due to failed attempts to call AT&T numbers.
Cyber experts told DailyMail.com that the problem had hallmarks of a cyber attack, possibly an attempt by hackers to blackmail the company or steal user data.
AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile users reported early Thursday that they were experiencing network problems nationwide and in Canada
According to DownDetector, more than 70,000 customers had reported outages on the AT&T network
The widespread nature, experts said, appeared comparable to “a massive Distributed Denial of Services (DDOS) attack on the core infrastructure of the Internet.”
With DDOS, cybercriminals attempt to crash a website or online service by bombarding it with a flood of unnecessary requests at the exact same time.
The surge of simple requests overloads the servers, causing them to become overwhelmed and shut down.
DDOS was deployed in 2016 when it disabled major sites like Netflix, Twitter, Amazon and PayPal for hours.
But the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that “the cause of the outage is unknown and there is no evidence of malicious activity.”