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BT has now put measures in place to prevent a reoccurrence
Today, Ofcom has fined BT £17.5 million for technical faults which caused 14,000 emergency calls to be missed over an 11-hour period last summer.
BT manages the UK’s emergency services call system. When someone dials 999, the call is routed to one of BT’s emergency call centers, where an operator will then transfer the call to the appropriate emergency services branch.
On 25 June last year, the company experienced a network fault that affected nearly 14,000 attempted emergency calls. After the incident, BT reported the incident to Ofcom, as is required by law. The operator said it had fully cooperated with Ofcom’s subsequent investigation and was “sincerely sorry for the distress caused” by the outage.
“We found that BT did not have sufficient warning systems in place for when this kind of incident occurs, nor did it have adequate procedures for promptly assessing the severity, impact and likely cause of any such incident or for identifying mitigating actions,” confirmed Ofcom in a statement today.
“We also found that BT’s disaster recovery platform had insufficient capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that might reasonably be expected,” it continued.
Ofcom has therefore fined BT £17.5 million and ordered measures be introduced to prevent reoccurrence.
The network outage did not result in any serious harm to the pub, which was reflected in the size of the fine.
“Today’s fine sends a broader warning to all firms -– if you’re not properly prepared to deal with disruption to your networks, we’ll hold you to strict account on behalf of consumers,” added Ofcom’s Director of Enforcement, Suzanne Cater.
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