WASHINGTON: T-Mobile USA has agreed to settle a US investigation for $19.5 million after more than 20,000 911 emergency calls failed after a massive outage in 2020.
A June 2020 Federal Communications Commission investigation found that the settlement was due to a shutdown for more than 12 hours, leading to overcrowding of No. 3 wireless carrier T-Mobile’s network, and “a full response to over 23,000 911 calls.” Failure”. this reason
T-Mobile has also agreed to make new commitments with the FCC to improve 911 outage notices as part of the consent decree.
An October 2020 FCC report found that a T-Mobile outage disrupted calling and texting services nationwide and access to data service in some areas. This resulted in a total of at least 250 million failed calls.
The FCC estimates that “more than 250 million calls to T-Mobile customers from customers of other service providers failed due to outages” and “all calls that attempt to use T-Mobile’s network during an outage” At least 41% of the calls were not completed successfully.
T-Mobile said on Tuesday that it has “built resilience into our emergency systems to ensure that our 911 elements are available when needed. Following this outage, we’ve changed our network to prevent this type of incident in the future.” has changed.” immediately take additional steps to increase it further
Then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC staff report showed the company did not follow established network reliability best practices that could potentially have prevented or reduced outages.
The FCC report states that the outage was “caused by an equipment failure and then intensified due to network routing misconfiguration when T-Mobile introduced a new router to its network.”
T-Mobile said its network had experienced an 18% reduction in completed calls during the first outage, but acknowledged in the report that network congestion was “probably before 2-3 as many of its customers could connect successfully.” ” Call effort required. ,
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