US telco giant AT&T has reached a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission and will pay nearly $1 million after shutting down 911 emergency calls in four states last year.

The outage hit services in parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin on August 22, 2023 and only lasted 74 minutes - but if you were one of the estimated 400 people trying to use the service it can't have been fun. In addition to the financial settlement AT&T will be monitored for three years to make sure it is fulfilling its emergency service provisioning responsibilities and outage notifications.

"Service providers have an obligation to transmit 911 calls and notify 911 call centers of outages in a timely manner," declared [PDF] FCC 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."

The outage was caused when an AT&T engineer running unscheduled maintenance shut down part of the network. For normal maintenance, testing would have been carried out first - to see how the shutdown would affect the rest of the network. This wasn't done since it was an impromptu attempt at a network fix.

In keeping with many such actions by US government agencies, this is a settlement, not a fine - meaning AT&T admits no guilt. The cost is equal to less than one hour of profit, according to the telco's last quarterly earnings statement. Making it equal to 74 minutes might have been proportional at least.

Within hours of the deal with the FCC being announced, AT&T suffered another 911 outage - this one lasting a couple of hours in New York, Houston, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina. The telco claimed the problem was a software fault.

"We are working to address a software issue that may affect the ability of a limited number of our customers to connect to our wireless network," AT&T told USA Today.

No doubt another administrative slap on the wrist is coming.

The accident-prone telco might be facing a much bigger charge from an outage in February this year, which caused a US-wide outage - including in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. That outage lasted around 12 hours and shut down all services - not just 911 calls.

"We have implemented changes to prevent what happened in February from occurring again," it promised at the time.

How's that going so far? ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/28/att_fcc_outage/