AT&T failed to notify 911 call centers of outage, pays $950K to settle probe

Enlarge / AT&T’s stand at Mobile World Congress on February 27, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: 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.”