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AT&T is giving customers a $5 credit for its cellphone outage. Some angry customers say it's not enough.

AT&T is giving customers a $5 credit for its cellphone outage. Some angry customers say it's not enough.::AT&T announced a $5 credit toward a future phone bill and said it "let down many of our customers" as a result of the outage.

retrieval4558 ,

Wasn't the outage due to a solar flare? I'm not one to stand up for big telecom companies but I'm not sure I'd be that pissed at them for what was essentially an "act of god" in insurance-speak.

I wasn't affected though so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Crack0n7uesday ,

I did the math the other day, during a 30 day billing cycle and the actual downtime, it's actually a pretty good deal, almost like they expect a lawsuit against them and are trying to get out in front of it.

kosanovskiy ,

Oh you lost a job offer or potential offer because our monkeys fuxked the network, sucks to be you. Go buy yourself a job.

shortwavesurfer ,

Since it was down for 1.6% of the month, then everybody should get a 1.6% discount.

foggy ,

I'd say that's fair for a service that isn't the backbone of emergency services, like TV, or even internet.

Not having phones in an emergency is a different ballgame. I feel like the FCC should have laws about cellphone uptime.

user224 ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

But that was just 1 network, no? You could still carry out emergency phone calls over other cell networks. Or does that not work in U.S.?

foggy ,

Emergency calls in both Europe and the US operate on the same cellular network. And pretty much all of the world that has cell service. Emergency numbers like 112 or 911 just get prioritization in the event of overloading/poor signal/etc.

In Europe, though, AML would send a GPS signal out which would alert emergency services of your failed attempt to call and your location. Not exactly a phone network, but I guess a "separate network" if we're being technical.

danc4498 ,

Did emergency services not work? My phone said “SOS Only”, which I assume would mean I could make 911 calls if I needed to.

EncryptKeeper ,

FirstNet was down on top of regular cell service. It’s not your ability to call 911, it’s how devices inside fire trucks for example connect to the internet and receive information, how volunteer firemen receive digital pages, etc.

danc4498 ,

That sounds worse.

EncryptKeeper ,

Well I’ll tell you one thing, there’s always a lot of discourse on why firehouses in the U.S. still use a siren when digital paging exists. This is why.

Willy ,

My local police made an announcement telling people to stop calling 911 to test their phones, so it worked, at least here.

ryathal ,

From my understanding, SOS only means the phone has signal to a tower that isn't in network, but will honor emergency calls.

danc4498 ,

At $30 a line, that’s not very much. I guess $5 is good

shortwavesurfer ,

Actually, you're totally right. They are giving you more now than you would get if they gave you a 1.6% discount.

Pyr_Pressure ,

No, just reimbursing for the actually time is not enough.

You enter into a contract for a service and that service was broken. There's the lack of reliability that's the issue.

If they were out for a month customers would suffer more than $30 in consequences from stuff like lost productivity.

If it were a pay-by-minute service than sure, but you purchase a month in the expectation it will work that entire month. They should get at least 25% of the monthly cost reimbursed if not the entire month.

ryathal ,

There's no way contracts are making 90%+ service uptime guarantees for consumer contracts. If you happened to have a 2 or 3 nines guarantee, then you are likely getting more than $5, but you also paid a lot for that.

Rai ,

I hate defending a huge bullshit Corp

But you’re so fully correct. The person you’re responding to is delusional, and all their numbers are insane

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The outage — which the company said an initial review indicated was caused by a software update — impacted tens of thousands of customers, some for nearly 12 hours.

The outage caused a nationwide stir after customers woke up to find their cellphones on SOS Mode, and even prompted the FBI and Homeland Security to investigate.

On X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, the company further explained in a post that it would take one to two billing cycles for customers to see the credit in their accounts.

To help make it right, we are applying a credit to potentially impacted accounts to help reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them - anytime and anywhere.

Soon after the announcement, some online users identifying as AT&T customers expressed frustration over the credit, saying it doesn't adequately cover their losses.

When asked for comment on the push-back from some of its customers about the amount of the credit, AT&T pointed Business Insider toward its previous apology.

The original article contains 525 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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