FCC investigating AT&T’s outage that blocked 25,000 calls to 911

Earlier this year, a big AT&T outage left millions of customers incommunicado for hours. The situation not only prevented normal calls, but also emergency calls. Now, an FCC report reveals that AT&T’s outage blocked up to 25000 calls to 911 while it was active.

The report comes from the FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. In total, the outage is said to have blocked more than 92 million calls in the US, including the 25000 calls to emergency numbers. The incident occurred in February and took many by surprise.

AT&T big February outage prevented up to 25,000 calls to 911

The report reveals that the outage was the product of multiple factors. However, the main one was the failed implementation of an improvement to AT&T’s network capacity. Sadly, there was an error in the equipment configuration during the process. The error triggered the “protect mode” on the carrier’s network, which resulted in the disconnection of many customers’ devices.

In the worst cases, affected users were without mobile network service for more than 12 hours. The outage impacted both the ability to make calls/send texts and the mobile data service. Correctly reconfiguring the affected AT&T’s network equipment took about 2 hours. However, all the devices that had been disconnected were trying to connect to the network again en masse. This was one of the causes of the outage being prolonged for many hours.

Failures in AT&T’s internal protocols prolonged the outage

In addition to the failed equipment configuration, the FCC report indicates that problems in following AT&T’s protocols influenced the prolongation of the outage that blocked 25000 calls to 911. For instance, the body mentions “a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility’s internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network.” There are several more factors included in the report.

Currently, the FCC is investigating the situation to determine potential sanctions against the mobile carrier. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau referred the incident to the FCC Enforcement Bureau. New developments are likely to emerge in the coming weeks. Taking into account the potential situations arising from blocking 911 calls for more than 12 hours, the penalties could be severe.