The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau (Bureau) has settled an investigation into two 911 outages on AT&T’s Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) network. The first outage occurred on March 8, 2017, lasted roughly five hours, and resulted in 12,600 failed 911 calls. The second outage occurred on May 1, 2017, lasted approximately 47 minutes, and resulted in 2,600 failed 911 calls. Both outages were caused by planned network changes that inadvertently interfered with AT&T’s routing of 911 calls.
The settlement, formally known as a Consent Decree, requires AT&T to pay a $5.25 million fine, implement system changes to reduce the likelihood and impact of future 911 outages, improve processes for notifying 911 call centers of future outages, ensure reliable 911 call completion, and file regular compliance reports with the Bureau.
