AT&T Has To Pay Up Millions After Two Major 911 Outages Last Year

AT&T has been fined $5.25 million for an outage last year that resulted in 12,000 callers not being able to reach 911. The FCC's Enforcement Bureau made the announcement on Thursday, stating that "such preventable outages are unacceptable." Gizmodo reports: Aside from the fine -- which is really a drop in the bucket for the billion-dollar behemoth -- AT&T must also make changes and enhancements to its systems to mitigate and soften the blow of future outages, as well as "regularly file compliance reports with the FCC." According to FCC rules, AT&T was required to "transmit all wireless 911 calls" as well as let emergency call centers know about outages if they last longer than 30 minutes. The two AT&T 911 outages investigated by the FCC, which occurred on March 8 and May 1 of 2017, lasted about five hours and 47 minutes, respectively. Around 12,600 users were unable to complete 911 calls during the March outage, with 2,600 failed 911 calls during the May outage.