By Chris Edwards
Nationwide, last Thursday, a mass outage of cellular phone service was reported. Customers of AT&T, as well as Verizon, T-Mobile and Cricket Wireless were affected, but according to reports, AT&T customers were the most widely affected.
According to a statement from AT&T, the widespread outage was caused by “the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network.”
On Thursday, the provider had more than 58,000 outages beginning around 11 a.m. and peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. According to reports, the outages began that day at 2:30 a.m. AT&T is the country’s largest telecommunications provider, with more than 240 million subscribers.
The biggest affected areas, according to a statement, were Dallas-Fort Worth; Austin; Houston; San Antonio; Miami; Atlanta; Chicago and Indianapolis.
Tyler County customers began reporting their service being restored at around noon. Following the outage, AT&T customers received text messages apologizing for the outage with a hyperlink to apply a $5 credit to an account.
By 3:10 p.m. on Thursday, AT&T reported that the widespread outages had been solved.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers,” the company stated on its website. “Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future,” the statement continued.
The company emphasized that the outage was not the result of a cyber attack, and added that the $5 credit is the average cost of a full day of service. It will typically be applied within two bill cycles, but does not apply to AT&T Business, or prepaid services through the provider, or Cricket Mobile.
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