As you may already know if you own an AT&T device that connects to the 3G network, like an iPhone 3GS or AT&T-connected netbook, the carrier's 3G service went out for some time this morning—"largely in the northeast," according to the company.

What you may not know is that some affected subscribers have received $25 credits toward their bills as compensation for the outage. At least one blog has reported such credits, and a Consumer Reports staffer just reported receiving one. However, in both cases the credit was not offered; the subscriber had to explicitly ask.

So you might want to ask for a credit if you were affected.

The other lesson from the outage? Twitter helped—but could have helped even more. GottaBeMobile, the blog that reported the credit, did so by picking up a tweet. AT&T got word out that it had ended the outage via the app. But it would have been even better had the company tweeted as soon as the outage happened, and given progress repprts on fixing it. From its twitter page, there's no sign it provided that information. —Paul Reynolds