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 has finally offered compensation to customers affected by its network outage that downed at least 70,000 phones.

The company blamed the outage earlier this week on a 'software update glitch' as it expanded its network coverage. 

However, there had been speculation that the issue may have been the result of a cyberattack, but the company said there were 'no indications of malicious activity'.

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

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

The company blamed the outage on a 'software update glitch' as it expended its network coverage

AT&T, headed by CEO John Stankey, has offered compensation to those effected by the outage 

'We apologize for Thursday's network outage. We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down,' AT&T said in a statement

'To help make it right, we're reaching out to potentially impacted customers and we're automatically applying a credit to their accounts.

They added: 'We want to reassure our customers of our commitment to reliably connect them – anytime and anywhere.' 

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

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

Cyber experts told DailyMail.com the issue had hallmarks of a cyberattack, potentially an attempt by hackers to blackmail the company or steal user data.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile users reported early on Thursday that they are having network issues nationwide and in Canada

According to DownDetector , over 70,000 customers had been reporting outages on the AT&T network

The widespread nature, according to experts, seemed similar to 'a massive Distributed Denial of Services (DDOS) attack on core Internet infrastructure.'

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

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

DDOS was deployed in 2016 when it knocked out major sites like Netflix, Twitter, Amazon and PayPal for hours. 

But the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that 'the cause of the outage is unknown and there are no indications of malicious activity.'