AT&T Hit With $950,000 Fine for 2023 911 Outage

AT&T will pay a $950,000 fine for failing to notify 911 call centers about a service outage that occurred in 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said this week. There was an AT&T outage in Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin in August 2023, and AT&T was penalized both for failing to deliver 911 calls and for not notifying call centers in a timely manner.

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The outage happened when AT&T was testing its 911 network. A technician accidentally disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T's system did not adjust to accommodate the disabled part of the network. It was not part of planned maintenance, and there was no stringent technical review. During the outage period, which lasted for a little over an hour, there were more than 400 failed 911 calls.

In addition to paying a $950,000 fine, AT&T has implemented a three-year compliance plan to make sure that it does not violate the FCC's 911 and outage notification rules going forward.

Service providers like AT&T are required to let call centers know about an outage right away so that the public can be notified about alternative ways to get emergency assistance.

It's been a bad year for AT&T. In March, AT&T confirmed that a 2021 data leak included the passcodes and sensitive info from 7.6 million AT&T customers and 65.4 million former AT&T customers. AT&T claimed that the data was obtained without unauthorized access to its systems, but hackers were able to get their hands on names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, social security numbers, and more from customers.

In April, the company was fined over $57 million for illegally sharing customer data with third-party data aggregators, an issue that Verizon and T-Mobile also had to shell out money for.

In July, AT&T announced a second major data breach. Hackers were able to get into a cloud platform used by AT&T, and stole the records of "nearly all" of its cellular customers. The stolen data included the phone numbers of cellular and landline customers, as well as records of calls and text messages between May and October 2022.

This week, AT&T is also in mediation with the hope of solving an ongoing Communication Workers strike in the southeast, which has impacted service in some areas and involves 17,000 employees.

Tag: AT&T

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Top Rated Comments

S.B.G Avatar
9 months ago
That dollar amount is barely 'the cost of doing business' for a company this size.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Baritone_Guy Avatar
9 months ago
I guess that’ll show em, right?
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mazda 3s Avatar
9 months ago
$950,000? Why even bother; that's nothing to AT&T.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
HMI Avatar
9 months ago
The medical bill for 1 person in the hospital when that happened is probably more than that
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Robert.Walter Avatar
9 months ago
I’m sure the C-suite chuckled and then lit up cigars at this “fine”.

Until fines cause denizens of C-suites to get fired or have their compensation curtailed, or they just get prosecuted from withholding investment, this scheisse will happen time and again and the C-suite will look at this as cost of doing business and price it into rates.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
goobot Avatar
9 months ago
This is like giving a fine to a regular person for a penny
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)