The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Enforcement Bureau have announced settlements with CenturyLink and West Safety Communications to conclude investigations into a multi-state 911 outage that took place August 1, 2018. The outage was caused by a mistaken reconfiguration to the 911 routing network that resulted in CenturyLink and West Safety Communications being unable to route 911 calls to call centers for 65 minutes. Per the Consent Decrees, CenturyLink and West Safety Communications have agreed to pay $400,000 and $175,000, respectively, to the U.S. Treasury. The companies have also committed to compliance plans over the next three years that require them to: (1) identify risks of disruptions and protect against those risks; (2) ensure detection of outages; (3) prepare to respond effectively to outages; and (4) plan to restore services as quickly as possible.
