T-Mobile 911 Outage: Carrier Agrees to Pay $20M to Settle FCC Investigation

T-Mobile's 911 outage last June 2020 cost the carrier millions of dollars after its settlement with the United States Federal Communications Commission of FCC over its investigation.

T-Mobile 911 Outage: Carrier Agrees to Pay $20M

To be precise, T-Mobile agreed to pay a pretty hefty settlement to the tune of $19.5 million after its 12-hour service outage last year, leading to its users' inability to contact the emergency hotline, 911, as per the report by Yahoo News.

On top of that, the FCC also revealed that T-Mobile agreed to implement some changes in its systems, which seeks to prevent another 911 outage in the future.

To do so, the carrier is set to follow a "compliance plan," which includes improvements in notifying its users regarding any outages in the emergency hotline, according to the news story by CNET.

T-Mobile 911 Outage FCC Investigation

The investigation of the FCC began in December 2020, a few months after the 12-hour long 911 outage last June 15, 2020.

The FCC further claimed that the T-Mobile 911 outage has led to the "complete failure of more than 23,000" emergency calls.

What's more, another 23,000 calls did not provide any location information from the caller. In addition to that, over 20,000 calls did not carry any callback information, which the authorities critically need.

Nevertheless, the commission admitted that it could not track the whole extent of the 911 outage and the specific numbers of affected users. However, it is clear that it took 12 hours before everything came back to normal.

T-Mobile 911 Outage: What's the Cause?

The FCC investigation, which has been ongoing for almost a year now, also learned that the cause of the outage is attributed to an issue with a fiber link on the network of T-Mobile.

The failure of the fiber link is caused by two problems in the third-party software, as well as a routing issue in one of the locations.

T-Mobile went on to regret the incident, noting that it has "built resiliency into our emergency system to ensure that our 911 elements are available."

The carrier further added that they are now implementing additional steps to prevent another 911 outage.

T-Mobile and FCC Investigation Settlement

CNET further noted in the same report that this is not the first time that T-Mobile is paying millions of dollars to settle an FCC investigation.

For instance, the carrier previously agreed to pay the commission a whopping $17.5 million to settle an FCC investigation, which focused on not just one, but two 911 outages incidents way back in Aug. 2014.

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Written by Teejay Boris