AT&T 911 outage sees company fined $950k; yesterday’s outage now fixed

An AT&T 911 outage back in 2023 has seen the company fined almost a million dollars. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says that the carrier not only failed to provide adequate backup coverage, but also didn’t let 911 centers know what had happened.

If this all sounds familiar, it is. The carrier was previously fined $5.25M for 911 outages back in 2017, and may well face a further sanction for another outage earlier this year …

AT&T 911 outages

More than 15,000 emergency calls were affected by two nationwide AT&T 911 outages in 2017.

The first outage occurred on March 8th and lasted for five hours, affecting 12,600 calls to 911. The second outage occurred on May 1st and lasted 47 minutes, resulting in 2,600 failed calls.

The company promised to make changes to ensure it couldn’t happen again, and to more promptly tell 911 centers what was going on.

Those changes didn’t seem to work too well, as there was another outage in August 2023, and the carrier again failed to keep affected 911 centers informed. The FCC says that this failure was due to human error.

The 911 outage occurred during testing of portions of AT&T’s 911 network. 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. The 911 outage lasted for 1 hour and 14 minutes, resulting in over 400 failed 911 calls.

An even larger failure occurred in February of this year.

A large-scale AT&T outage across the US has been acknowledged by the carrier, which says it is investigating […] Multiple 911 centers have reported that users have been unable to use the emergency number.

That one was found to have been caused by another error, this time with a software update.

Carrier fined $950,000

The FCC says it has fined the company close to a million dollars.

The Federal Communications Commission today announced a $950,000 settlement with AT&T to resolve an Enforcement Bureau investigation into whether the company violated FCC rules by failing to deliver 911 calls to, and failing to timely notify, 911 call centers in connection with an outage AT&T experienced on August 22, 2023.

Sadly, this may not prove too much of a wake-up call to a company worth $140B.

Another outage, just yesterday

The AT&T network experienced another outage just yesterday, lasting several hours, reports CNET.

Thousands of AT&T subscribers across the US experienced an hours-long network outage Tuesday that prevented them from placing or receiving calls, sending texts, or accessing the internet on their iPhones […]

AT&T blamed the outage on a software issue and said it is working on a solution.

The carrier today told The Verge that it was now fixed.

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash