FCC Fines AT&T $5.25M Over 911 Outages in 2017

AT&T will pay $5.25 million to settle a federal investigation into outages of 911 service in early 2017.

The Federal Communications Commission added that the company, as a condition of the settlement, must take steps to ensure reliable 911 call completion, curb the likelihood and impact of outages, improve notifications of 911 call centers during outages and file compliance reports with the agency.

The FCC’s investigation found that planned network changes made by AT&T on March 8, 2017, and May 1, 2017, resulted in inadvertent interference with 911 call routing on its VoLTE network on those days.

The March outage lasted five hours and led to failed 911 calls from about 12,600 unique users, while the May outage resulted in 2,600 failed calls over 47 minutes.

“Robust and reliable 911 service is a national priority, as repeatedly expressed by both Congress and the commission,” the agency said in a statement. “Carriers have a responsibility to both prevent outages and, if they do take place, quickly inform the commission and affected 911 call centers.”

AT&T said it cooperated with the probe and that it has “taken steps to prevent this from happening again,” according to Reuters.