It must be a really harrowing experience if you have to contact emergency responders and the 911 call doesn’t connect, but that’s what happened to thousands of T-Mobile customers in the US over a 12-hour period on June 15, 2020.
As a result of this alarming incident, the wireless carrier this week agreed to pay $19.5 million in settlement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Nationwide 911 outages last year resulted in a “complete failure” of more than 23,000 emergency calls, according to the FCC report.
The initial cause of the downtime was attributed to a “brief outage of a leased fiber optic transport link in the T-Mobile network,” the FCC said, adding that “the outage was detected, and was exacerbated by a temporary routing error.” Two previously known bugs in the location and third-party software. Recovery was also affected by a temporary blockage in remote access to the affected transport link.
In a much-discussed statement about this week’s agreement with the FCC, T-Mobile said it has since improved the reliability of its emergency systems to ensure that 911 is available to customers when they need it.
“We understand how important reliable connectivity is to ensuring public safety and we take that responsibility very seriously,” T-Mobile said in the statement. “We have built resilience into our emergency systems to ensure that our 911 elements are available when needed. This was a short-term isolated outage and we have taken steps to further improve our network to prevent such incidents in the future. To take immediate steps.
The company said it “now proceeded with the FCC’s investigation and continued our focus on building our continued network.”
This isn’t the first time that T-Mobile customers have had problems calling 911. Multiple outages in 2014 blocked service for a total of three hours. The carrier agreed to pay the FCC $17.5 million to settle the matter.
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