AT&T finally tries to make amends for massive outage that left more than 70,000 without service…and customers are left fuming at the deal

AT&T finally offered compensation to customers affected by its network outage that left at least 70,000 phones out of service.

The company attributed the outage earlier this week to a “software update failure” as it expanded its network coverage.

However, there was speculation that the issue could have been the result of a cyberattack, but the company said there was “no indication of malicious activity.”

Both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are investigating.

A $5 credit will be applied to the accounts of affected customers, the company said Saturday.

‘We apologize for the network outage on Thursday. “We recognize the frustration this disruption has caused and know we disappointed many of our customers,” AT&T said in a statement.

‘To help correct this, we are contacting potentially affected customers and automatically applying a credit to their accounts.

They added: “We want to assure our customers of our commitment to connecting them reliably, anytime, anywhere.”

The outage was first reported in the early hours of Thursday morning when customers were unable to make emergency calls, and several 911 centers reported users were unable to connect.

There were reports that other networks were affected, but this is believed to have been the result of failed attempts to place calls to AT&T numbers.

Cyber ​​experts told DailyMail.com that the issue had characteristics of a cyber attack, potentially an attempt by hackers to blackmail the company or steal user data.

The widespread nature, according to experts, appeared similar to “a massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the Internet’s core infrastructure.”

Using DDOS, cybercriminals attempt to crash a website or online service by bombarding it with a torrent of extraneous requests at exactly the same time.

The surge of simple requests overloads servers, causing them to become overwhelmed and shut down.

DDOS was implemented in 2016 when it brought down major sites such as Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, and PayPal for hours.

But the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that “the cause of the outage is unknown and there is no indication of malicious activity.”