AT&T will give a $5 credit to customers for its major outage downtime

Were you affected by the AT&T outage that left customers unable to use their cellular service this past Thursday?

AT&T would like to make it right by issuing a $5 credit to your account.

That's right. Five bucks. According to AT&T, that amount is the equivalent of one day of service on an average AT&T mobile plan.

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"We recognize the frustration Thursday’s outage caused & know we let many of our customers down," the official AT&T account posted on X. "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. It will take 1-2 billing cycles to see the credit, depending on when their bill closes."

The company offered an apology on a webpage that was set up to provide customers with details of the credit offer titled "Making it right." The mobile carrier said it's taking steps to ensure a similar outage does not happen again in the future.

AT&T suffered a major outage on Thursday, affecting users all across the U.S. Some customers couldn't use their cell service for 5 or more hours.  The outage was so severe that AT&T customers' experience began affecting downtime reports of various web services and other mobile carriers. Customers at companies like T-Mobile were reporting downtime due to their inability to call AT&T customers, unaware it wasn't their service provider causing the issues.

The reaction to AT&T's $5 credit has been mixed, with some customers appreciative of the offer and others noticing the various caveats to the offer.

$5 may seem like a fair credit to a customer on a single phone plan. However, according to a footnote on AT&T's website for the offer, the $5 credit is per account, not per device. This means that an AT&T customer with multiple phone lines on their account will only receive a $5 credit in total.

In addition, the $5 credit will not apply at all to customers with an AT&T Business account or customers who use AT&T's prepaid service. Customers of Cricket Wireless, a cellular provider owned by AT&T, will also not be eligible for the $5 credit.

AT&T customers do not have to do anything to receive the $5 credit if they are eligible. AT&T says the amount will be credited within one or two billing cycles.