AT&T (News - Alert) U-verse has restored power to most customers after thousands of users throughout several Southeastern and Southwestern states found themselves without TV, Internet or phone service for several days. But its reputation may take a bit longer to rectify.
The outage began on Monday and continued as late as Thursday morning for some U-verse end users. "The issue impacting some U-verse subscribers has been tracked back to a software upgrade," the company wrote on its Facebook page.
Predictably, the telco has been battered by disgruntled users who took to Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert) to make their complaints known.
““Yeah MLK day is great and everything but how about fixing my cable and Internet that has been out for the past two days? Maybe with a little sense of urgency since I’m paying you every month without ever being late,” one person commented on Facebook.
As for Twitter (News - Alert), the @Uverse handle certainly got a workout, with profuse apologies streaming out of the feed from the carrier. Even after service was restored, it didn’t seem to be performing up to par.
“@Uverse it’s been back online for me since this morning but very slow. 2Mbps instead of usual 22+Mbps,” @paltman reported.
Despite the Twitter overload, AT&T said that the affected less than 1 percent of its 7.4 million U-verse subscribers (in other words, 74,000 customers). “We know we have a U-verse issue affecting less than 1 percent of our U-verse subscribers, but that is too many,” AT&T said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are working hard to fix this and making progress — the issue is related to servers. We still are working to determine when service will be completely restored. We sincerely apologize for this.”
Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, told the New York Times that those who were caught in the service failure will get refunds. “U-verse service has been restored for the vast majority of our customers affected by the outage,” he said. “We expect any remaining customer issues will be resolved this morning. We will provide a credit to customers who were affected. We know our customers count on their U-verse service and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Adding insult to injury, its wireless service apparently went out for about two hours as well on Thursday. “Earlier today, some customers in Kansas and Western Missouri may have experienced issues with 3G wireless services,” AT&T said in a statement. “AT&T technicians quickly worked to resolve the issue, and service is currently running normally. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.”