LITTLE ROCK — Some AT&T U-verse customers were still without service Friday, after the company said Thursday that service had been restored to all subscribers.
Customers in Arkansas and other Southern states said they were still experiencing problems with their Internet and television service. The service failures started Monday and were attributed to a software problem.
Bob Parette, of Little Rock, said his AT&T Uverse service was briefly restored Thursday night after it stopped working Monday, but by Friday his service was off again.
“I put it as the worse experience I ever had,” said the Little Rock resident. “It’s aggravating. I never know if it’s going to be on or not.”
Parette, 80, said he uses his Internet connection every week to visit with his son, who lives in China, using Skype, software that allows users to hold a video conference.
“I haven’t talked to him this week because I had no service,” Parette said.
Parette said he called AT&T but the company wouldn’t tell him when his service would be restored.
“They are real good about not being expressive,” he said.
AT&T probably could be handling its current problems better from a public-relations perspective, said Neal Moore, owner of Neal Moore Creative in Little Rock.
Years ago, Southwestern Bell, the predecessor to AT&T, had a public-relations department with eight to 10 employees, said Moore, who has been in advertising and public relations for about 25 years. Now AT&T’s public relations in Arkansas is handled by a contractor.
AT&T “should have been more proactive” in facing its troubles with service failures, Moore said.
Primarily, AT&T would benefit from having a customer-service team calling customers and explaining the reason for the problems, Moore said.
AT&T U-verse said Thursday that the software problem was fixed and that the service was restored to all customers.
The company said Friday that the service failure affected less than 1 percent of the company’s television and Internet subscribers.
AT&T saw its U-verse customer base rise in the fourth quarter of 2012, the company said Thursday in its quarterly earnings report. It added 609,000 U-verse customers during the quarter, raising the number of subscribers to about 7.7 million.
“U-verse service has been restored,” Anita Smith, spokesman for AT&T, said Friday in an e-mail message, repeating Thursday’s announcement. “Customers experiencing issues may need to manually reboot their residential gateway.”
Rebooting the device did not appear to work for some.
Many customers posted messages Friday on the company’s Facebook page and on Twitter to tell U-verse that they had no service.
“I’m without Internet since Mon. Was told service restored everywhere. Tried reboot several times-in vain Still without net :-( ,” said one unverified Twitter user.
Another unverified customer, who was asked by a U-verse employee on Twitter if he had rebooted, said he restarted his computer “Numerous times along with resetting it.” According to the customer’s Twitter messages, it was his third day without service.
Smith said customers still without service Friday would “need to be examined on a case-by-case basis” and encouraged customers to “contact AT&T Customer Care.”
AT&T said Thursday that it will credit the accounts of U-verse customers who have experienced failures.
“AT&T will issue credits to customers we know are impacted,” Smith said. “ We’re crediting customers based on the length of their outage.”
She said the credit will appear on customers’ bills within 30 to 60 days.
“If they haven’t seen a credit on their bill within 60 days, they can call us to make sure they receive it,” Smith said.
Smith could not confirm reports that customers are being credited $5 for each day without service.
Information for this article was contributed by David Smith of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Business, Pages 31 on 01/26/2013