Counting the cost of AT&T’s outage

AT&T said it will offer customers a $5 credit to apologize for its recent outage. According to one estimate, that could cost the company up to $140 million.

That figure puts AT&T roughly in line with other mobile network operators struggling with similar issues. For example, Australian operator Optus said its 2023 outage cost the company around $40 million. And the 2022 outage that affected Canadian operator Rogers is estimated to have cost up to $70 million.

However, AT&T’s costs could stretch far beyond the refund it’s giving to customers. “We believe the impact of this outage is likely impossible to quantify until the dust settles and the companies provide updates on subscriber trends (likely during upcoming conferences),” wrote the financial analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets in a note to investors last week, shortly after the outage began.

Aside from potentially losing customers to the likes of Verizon and T-Mobile, the analysts argued that AT&T could also face fines over the situation, as well as a possible congressional review “given the criticality of the service.”

There’s precedent for at least some of those ramifications. For example, Optus rival Telstra revealed that the company’s outage drove “tens of thousands” of Optus customers to its network. Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned after the outage.

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