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.
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.
