It must be a terrifying experience to have to contact first responders and have the 911 call not connect, but that's exactly what happened to thousands of T-Mobile jobs customers in the United States on June 15, 2020. As a result of the frightening incident, the wireless carrier agreed to pay the Federal Communications Commission $19.5 million in a settlement this week (FCC).
According to the FCC report, the nationwide 911 outage last year resulted in the "complete failure" of over 23,000 emergency calls. The initial cause of the downtime was attributed to the “brief failure of a leased fiber transport link in the T-Mobile network,” the FCC said, adding: “The outage revealed, and was compounded by, a temporary routing flaw in a single location and two previously undetected flaws in third-party software jobs. The restoration was also impacted by a temporary failure of remote access to the affected transport link.”
T-Mobile stated in a widely publicized statement following this week's FCC settlement that it had since improved the reliability of its emergency systems to ensure that 911 is available to customers when needed.
“We understand how critical reliable connectivity is to ensure public safety jobs and we take that responsibility very seriously,” T-Mobile said in the statement. “We have built resiliency into our emergency systems to ensure that our 911 elements are available when they’re needed. This was a short-term isolated outage and we immediately took steps to further enhance our network to prevent this type of event from happening in the future.”
