AT&T to offer a credit to accounts impacted by the US cellphone network outage

AT&T said it will be applying a credit to potentially impacted accounts of Thursday’s network outage.

A statement posted to its website on Sunday morning apologized for the outage.

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"We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down," the statement read. "We understand this may have impacted their ability to connect with family, friends, and others. Small business owners may have been impacted, potentially disrupting an essential way they connect with customers."

AT&T said the credit will automatically be applied to customer accounts in one to two billing cycles and will amount to "the average cost of a full day of service."

The fine print read, "One $5 credit per account on your AT&T Wireless^SM account. Offer does not apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket."

AT&T also said it is taking steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. 

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The outage knocked out cellphone service for thousands of its users across the U.S. starting early Thursday before it was restored.

AT&T blamed the incident on an error in coding, without elaborating.

Outage tracker Downdetector noted that outages, which began at about 3:30 a.m. ET, peaked at around 73,000 reported incidents. AT&T had more than 58,000 outages around noon ET, in locations including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago. The carrier is the country's largest, with more than 240 million subscribers.

By 9 p.m. ET, the reports on AT&T's network were fewer than 1,000.

Cricket Wireless, which is owned by AT&T, had more than 9,000 outages at one point but the reports had also tailed off later in the afternoon. Users of other carriers, including Verizon and T-Mobile, also reported issues but those companies said their networks were operating normally and the problems were likely stemming from customers trying to connect to AT&T users.