AT&T has been fined $950,000 by the FCC for failing to deliver emergency 911 calls during an outage in August 2023. The one-hour and 14-minute outage disrupted services in Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin, causing over 400 emergency calls to fail.
The FCC investigation found that alongside the failure to deliver calls, AT&T didn’t notify the affected emergency call centers quickly enough. The disruption occurred while testing AT&T’s 911 network, when a contracted technician disabled a part of the network, and the system didn’t automatically adjust, leading to the failure.
As a part of the settlement, AT&T will adopt a three-year compliance plan to ensure they follow the FCC’s 911 and outage notification rules. These measures aim to prevent similar incidents and improve the reliability of emergency call services. An AT&T spokesperson stated, “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.”
This incident isn’t isolated. The FCC continues to investigate a significant outage in February 2023, which prevented 25,000 emergency calls and affected 125 million devices across all 50 states. The FCC concluded in July that the cause was a single misconfigured network element by an employee. In response, AT&T has stated that they have implemented the necessary changes, acknowledging their failure to meet customer and public safety expectations.
The issue of supporting emergency services is not confined to the US. In the UK, BT was fined £17.5 million after technical faults caused 14,000 emergency calls to be missed over an 11-hour period. The UK regulator Ofcom has mandated measures to prevent similar issues.
