March 911 Outage Affected More Than 12,000 Callers
March 23 2017 - 3:07PM
Dow Jones News
By Ryan Knutson
More than 12,000 AT&T Inc. wireless customers couldn't get
through to 911 during a five-hour outage earlier this month,
federal regulators said Thursday.
The outage occurred on March 8, starting in parts of the central
and eastern U.S. before spreading to the rest of the country, said
Lisa Fowlkes, acting head of the Federal Communications
Commission's public safety and homeland security bureau, during an
FCC meeting. The commission is investigating the incident and
called for "interested parties to submit information concerning the
cause, effect and implication" of it.
The outage occurred after AT&T made changes to its network
that caused automatic 911 routing to fail, Ms. Fowlkes said. The
failure primarily affected calls made via Voice Over Long Term
Evolution, or VoLTE, a digital calling technology frequently
running on smartphones.
Some calls were routed manually by a backup center, but the
volume quickly exceeded its capacity, resulting in a large number
of calls being dropped, Ms. Fowlkes said. During the outage,
callers heard either a fast busy signal, ringing with no answer, or
no sound at all.
AT&T said it was addressing the issue and would continue to
work with the FCC as it completes its investigation.
The Dallas telecommunications company suffered a separate 911
outage on March 11 that was caused by a hardware failure, but only
a small number of people were affected, Ms. Fowlkes said.
The outage is among a string of recent, high-profile 911
problems. In October, 911 suffered what experts believe is the
largest cyberattack ever against it. Also last fall, a 911 center
in Florida was overrun with robocalls from telemarketers. Dallas
residents have also been dealing with long wait times when calling
911 due to staffing and technical problems.
Write to Ryan Knutson at ryan.knutson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 23, 2017 14:52 ET (18:52 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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