AT&T Pays to Resolve 911 Outage Investigation

AT&T agreed to pay $950,000 after a Federal Communications Commission investigation found the company failed to deliver 911 calls to emergency call centers and failed to notify officials during an outage in August 2023, a the agency said Monday.

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

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

“We understand the importance of having critical access to 911. We have addressed this issue and are committed to keeping our customers connected when they need it most,” an AT&T spokesperson said.

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

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

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

In June, wireless company Verizon Communications agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to settle an FCC investigation after the company failed to deliver 911 calls during a six-state outage 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 outage in October 2022.

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