AT&T reiterates financial guidance, to give billing credits to consumers

AT&T‘s CEO, John Stankey, sent a letter to employees on the resolved network outage that occurred on February 22. In this letter, the company reiterated its financial guidance provided with its earnings report in January 2024. The letter states in part that, “Our initial review of the cause of Thursday’s outage indicates it was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network… The outage began in the early hours on Thursday, and we know that about three-quarters of our customers were able to access our network as they started their days around 5 a.m. CT. We prioritized FirstNet service restoration, in line with our commitment to our nation’s first responders. The remaining customers were reconnected throughout the morning. Teams worked hard to successfully normalize the network by around noon CT… For the portion of consumer and small business customers most impacted by the outage, we are automatically applying an account credit to compensate them for the inconvenience they experienced. Prepaid customers will have options available to them if they were impacted. We are also working closely with our Mid-Market and Enterprise customers and will address their concerns as those discussions take place… We all know that our customers receive tremendous value and convenience for the nominal daily cost of our service, and outages sometimes have outsized impacts on some subscribers that may be greater than the face value of the credit. For that reason, I believe that crediting those customers for essentially a full day of service is the right thing to do. Despite that impact to the business, I believe this approach is fully manageable while achieving the 2024 business objectives we have set for ourselves and our stated financial guidance.”