Getty Images | Joan Cros Garcia-Corbis
AT&T agreed to pay a $950,000 fine for an August 2023 outage in four states in which the carrier failed to deliver 911 calls and did not make timely notifications of the outage to eight 911 call centers. “As part of the settlement, AT&T will implement a three-year compliance plan designed to ensure future compliance with the FCC’s 911 and outage notification rules,” the Federal Communications Commission said in a press release yesterday.
The 2023 outage lasted 1 hour and 14 minutes, affecting users in Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin. It resulted in over 400 failed 911 calls.
“The 911 outage occurred during testing of portions of AT&T’s 911 network,” the FCC said. “During the testing, an AT&T contractor’s technician inadvertently disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T’s system did not automatically adjust to accommodate the disabled portion of the network, resulting in the outage. The testing was not associated with any planned maintenance activities and, thus, did not undergo the stringent technical review that would have otherwise been conducted.”
There were 315 Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), or 911 call centers, that had to be notified of the outage. “AT&T sent timely initial notifications to 307 of the 315 potentially affected PSAPs about the 911 outage. However, AT&T failed to timely notify eight potentially affected PSAPs,” a consent decree that AT&T agreed to said. AT&T acknowledged in the settlement “that it is responsible for complying with applicable Rules regardless of any alleged failures by its contractor.”
Notifying each call center of an outage is important because “a call center may then notify the public of the outage and provide information on alternative ways to obtain emergency assistance, such as by calling the center on a 10-digit number or texting 911,” the FCC said.
Bigger penalty may be coming
AT&T may be hit with another fine for a more recent and far more severe outage that happened in February 2024. The February 2024 outage was caused by a botched update that kicked all user devices off the network, blocking over 92 million phone calls, including over 25,000 attempts to reach 911.
The FCC last month issued a report criticizing AT&T for not following best practices dictating “that network changes must be thoroughly tested, reviewed, and approved” before implementation. The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau referred the matter to the agency’s Enforcement Bureau for potential violations of FCC rules.
AT&T has already made some changes in response to its February 2024 failures. AT&T is now “scanning the network for any network elements lacking the controls that would have prevented the outage,” and it “implemented additional steps for peer review and adopted procedures to ensure that maintenance work cannot take place without confirmation that required peer reviews have been completed,” the FCC’s July 2024 report said.
Those changes were separate from the compliance plan in the newly announced settlement over the August 2023 outage. The compliance plan includes updates to PSAP notification procedures, enhanced monitoring after network changes, improved testing during and outside maintenance windows, risk assessments, and compliance training for employees.