AT&T to pay $950,000 to resolve investigation into 911 outage

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - AT&T has agreed to pay $950,000 after a Federal Communications Commission investigation found the company failed to deliver 911 calls to emergency call centers and did not notify officials during an August 2023 outage, the agency said on Monday.

The outage, which occurred during testing of portions of AT&T’s 911 network, impacted calls in parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin. AT&T failed to deliver 911 calls and failed to timely notify 911 call centers.

AT&T has agreed as part of the settlement to implement a three-year plan aimed at ensuring future compliance with the FCC’s 911 and outage notification rules. The 911 outage lasted for 1 hour and 14 minutes, resulting in over 400 failed 911 calls, the FCC said.

"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," an AT&T spokesperson said.

The FCC said during testing, an AT&T contractor technician inadvertently disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T’s system did not automatically adjust. The testing was not connected to planned maintenance activities and as a result did not undergo the stringent technical review that would have otherwise been undertaken, the FCC added.

The FCC is separately investigating a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that lasted over 12 hours that blocked more than 92 million voice calls and prevented more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911, the agency said.

Last month, Charter Communications agreed to pay $15 million to resolve an FCC investigation into compliance with network and 911 outage notification rules.

In June, Verizon Communications wireless business agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to resolve an FCC investigation after the company failed to deliver 911 calls during an outage in six states in December 2022.

The FCC said the outage lasted an hour and forty-four minutes and prevented hundreds of 911 calls from completing and was similar to an October 2022 outage.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Nick Zieminski and Aurora Ellis)