AT&T Will Automatically Credit Customers for Outages

AT&T has announced a new policy of automatically crediting customers a full day of service when the company is at fault for wireless outages of an hour or more. The new "AT&T Guarantee" is similar to the company's ad hoc response to a major outage almost a year ago. For an outage lasting more than 24 hours, customers will be credited for each additional day of the outage. The new policy has plenty of fine print, however. It only applies to postpaid customers with accounts in good standing and excludes FirstNet customers. Outages beyond the control of AT&T are excluded, including "natural disasters, weather-related events, or outages caused by third parties." An "outage" means at least ten towers out for 60 or more minutes "resulting from a single incident". To qualify, the customer must have been connected to an affected tower right before the outage, and lose service for at least 60 consecutive minutes as a result of the outage. The credit will be calculated based on the customer's base service plan price, excluding device payments, add-on services, taxes, and fees. Bill credits will be applied within 1–2 billing cycles. The company is also announcing a similar policy for its fiber customers that kicks in at 20 minutes instead of 60.