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The fine is the second the company has received related to poor emergency services call handling this year. Back in February, an outage that lasted 12 hours blocked 92 million phone calls.
AT&T has agreed to pay a $950,000 fine to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after an investigation found it had failed to deliver emergency 911 calls during an August 2023 outage.
The outage, which lasted for 1 hour and 14 minutes, affected parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin, resulting in over 400 failed 911 calls.
As well as failing to deliver the calls, the FCC’s investigation revealed that AT&T did not notify the affected emergency call centers quickly enough.
The outage occurred during the testing of AT&T’s 911 network, when a contracted technician inadvertently disabled a part of the network. AT&T’s system did not automatically adjust, which led to the disruption.
As part of the settlement, AT&T will implement a three-year compliance plan to ensure it will adhere to the FCC’s 911 and outage notification rules, which aim to prevent similar incidents and improve the reliability of emergency call services.
“We understand the importance of having critical access to 911. We’ve resolved this matter and are committed to keeping our customers connected in times they need it most,” an AT&T spokesperson said.
The FCC is already investigating an additional AT&T outage that occurred in February this year. The outage impacted 125 million devices in all 50 states, and prevented 25,000 calls to 911 call centres.
The FCC concluded in July that the outage was caused by an employee who misconfigured a single network element.
AT&T said it has implemented the necessary changes, adding that it “fell short of the standards that we hold ourselves to, and we regret that we failed to meet the expectations of our customers and the public safety community.”
Failure to adequately support emergency services is not just a US problem. In the UK, regulator Ofcom fined BT £17.5 million last month for technical faults which caused 14,000 emergency calls to be missed over an 11-hour period last summer. Ofcom also ordered measures be introduced to prevent reoccurrence.
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