The Federal Communications Commission has announced two settlements with telecom service providers in regards to network outages during 2023.
AT&T will pay nearly a million dollars as part of its settlement. In addition to the $950,000 fine for the network outage on August 22, 2023, AT&T will put in place a three-year compliance plan.
The AT&T network outage of August 2023 affected 911 calls and 911 call centers in parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas and Wisconsin. The 911 outage occurred during testing of parts of AT&T’s 911 network, according to the FCC. 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 agency said, adding that the outage lasted for an hour and 14 minutes and resulted in more than 400 911 calls not going through.
“Service providers have an obligation to transmit 911 calls and notify 911 call centers of outages in a timely manner,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. “Our rules are designed to protect the public and ensure that public safety officials can inform consumers of alternate ways to reach emergency services in the event of an outage.”
This settlement does not involve AT&T’s nationwide outage in February 2024, which was caused by a botched software upgrade; that incident has been referred to the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau but has not yet resulted in penalties. The FCC investigative report on that outage is available here. The settlement also does not involve an AT&T data breach earlier this year.
The Altice Mobile MVNO, meanwhile, faces a fine of $96,000 over failing to meet network outage reporting requirements. U.S. service providers are required to report outages when they last for at least 30 minutes and potentially impact at least 900,000 user-minutes of voice and associated data services—and they have to make the report within a certain time period of discovering the outage. Altice had two, multi-hour outages in March and July 2023 that met the reporting threshold, but it filed late reports in both those instances, according to the FCC. However, while several hundred thousand wireless users across Altice’s service footprint, 911 calls were not involved because the company does not route 911 calls through its own core network, the agency noted.
Altice, too, will put in place a three-year compliance plan.
