T-Mobile to Pay $19.5 Million Fine Over 911 Outage

There’s one phone number you should always be able to call in an emergency, but for over 12 hours in June 2020, many T-Mobile customers were unable to reach 911.

That has now resulted in a $19.5 million fine for the carrier, the FCC announced this week, for failing to connect more than 23,000 911 calls. Operators were unable to determine location or callback numbers for thousands more callers during the outage, the agency says.

The outage happened due to “the brief failure of a leased fiber transport link in the T-Mobile network,” and was “compounded by a temporary routing flaw in a single location and two previously undetected flaws in third-party software,” the FCC says.

In addition to the fine, T-Mobile must now implement a compliance plan that will have it take more proactive steps to prepare for and respond to any future outages.

This isn’t the first time T-Mobile’s network has had this kind of outage, though. Two outages occurred in 2014 that lasted roughly three hours, during which T-Mobile failed to connect callers with 911 emergency services. Afterward, T-Mobile reached a similar settlement with the FCC requiring a $17.5 million payment and the adoption of new compliance measures.

That earlier settlement required T-Mobile to improve its ability to identify and avoid risks that could lead to 911 service disruptions, a largely similar order to this 2021 consent decree. 

These outages aren’t something other carriers are immune to, either, as Verizon faced a similar outage in 2014 and paid a $3.4 million settlement to the FCC.