AT&T said Thursday that it had restored service to "the vast majority" of customers affected by a widespread network outage that had left thousands of people across the South without high-speed Internet, digital TV and digital phone service since Monday.
But some customers whose service was restored said they were frustrated by how AT&T communicated with them about the outage.
One customer from Fayetteville, Ark., wrote Thursday morning in an AT&T online forum that her Internet service has been down since Monday night.
"Like the rest, I have had no satisfaction from ATT regarding cause or estimated time of resolution," the customer wrote. "My daughter's schooling is 90% Internet-based, so it's a major disruption for us."
AT&T attributed the outage to a software upgrade and said it affected less than 1 percent of its 7.4 million U-Verse subscribers. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said that the company had restored service to "the vast majority of our customers affected by the outage" by Thursday.
"We expect any remaining customer issues will be resolved this morning," Siegel said in an email. "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."
AT&T also apologized and updated customers on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, eliciting a string of negative comments from people who questioned the wisdom of sending online updates when the intended recipients may lack Internet service.
"My problem was I could not get onto the Internet so how can they expect me to go online?" Craig Parrish, of Cleveland, Tenn., wrote on AT&T's Facebook page. "If they knew they had a software problem, why didn't they come out and tell you?"
"Does anyone else see the irony in this apology going out over the Internet?" another customer wrote on AT&T's Facebook page. "If you can read this, this statement probably doesn't apply to you."