FCC Reaches $17.5 Million Settlement with T-Mobile for Nationwide 911 Outages

The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau has reached a $17.5 million settlement with T-Mobile, resolving an investigation into two 911 service outages that occurred on the company's national network in 2014. The separate but related outages, which together lasted approximately three hours, prevented T-Mobile customers from reaching first responders when making wireless 911 calls. As part of the settlement, T-Mobile has agreed to strengthen its 911 service procedures and to adopt robust compliance measures to ensure that it adheres to the FCC's 911 service reliability and outage notification rules in the future.

T-Mobile's networks suffered two 911 outages on August 8, 2014. Both T-Mobile outages were nationwide outages, affecting almost all of T-Mobile's then 50 million customers. Simply put, a T-Mobile customer dialing 911 during these outages would not have reached first responders. In its investigation, the Enforcement Bureau found that T-Mobile did not provide timely notification of the August 8, 2014, outages to all affected 911 call centers, as required by FCC rules. The investigation also found that the outages would have been avoided if T-Mobile had implemented appropriate safeguards in its 911 network architecture.