AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) has announced that it will waive data overages for customers across almost 1,100 ZIP codes affected due to the Nashville explosion near the company’s office on Christmas Day.
AT&T waives data overage charges
The telecommunication giant announced that it is waiving data overages through to New Year’s Eve across seven states. Wireless and prepaid users will have service charges automatically waived across Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, Illinois, Alabama, and Missouri.
A statement from the company stated that the Nashville explosion on Christmas day affected communications from most of the people in the seven states. Its office in 2nd Avenue experienced significant damage from the blast and the facility includes connection points for internet services including local wireless and internet. Although local services were not affected because of the temporary battery power that was also lost after some time as fire damage and water took out backup power generators. This left the regions without internet and the company has been working to restore that.
Jeff McElfresh the company’s CEO said that keeping customers connected is always the company’s priority. As a result, with the outage and problems with recovery the company saw the right thing to do is waiving wireless data overage charges for customers in the zip codes during the period of outage.By Sunday evening the company said it had restored 96% of the wireless network, 86% of broadband and entertainment services, and 60% of business services.
AT&T restoring service
McElfresh said that the company’s office had suffered considerable damage with most of its backup generators taken out. He said that this led to the service disruptions and some customers were still experiencing outages 48 hours later. McElfresh said that it is frustrating and apologized to consumers for the inconvenience.
Already power has been restored on multiple floors in the company’s offices and around 25 temporary cell towers and 24 trailers of disaster equipment deployed across the region. AT&T is determined to restore the service and will continue prioritizing the security of all facilities serving customers nationwide.
