T-Mobile to pay $19.5 million after emergency calls fail

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T-Mobile to pay $19.5 million after emergency calls fail

T-Mobile will pay some $19.5 million as part of a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission FCC after a 12 hour outage in June 2020, which resulted in tens of thousands of emergency 911 calls failing.

The FCC said that T-Mobile agreed to pay the settlement and adopt a compliance plan to deal with 911 outage issues, as well as provide follow-up notices within two hours of initial outage notifications.

On 15 June 2020, the FCC noted that a 13-hour and 13-minute outage took place that resulted in the complete failure of more than calls, as well as tens of thousands of 911 calls without location or available call back information.

In a statement on Wednesday, T-Mobile told ABC news: "We understand how critical reliable connectivity is to ensuring public safety, and we take that responsibility very seriously." We have built resiliency into our emergency systems to make sure that our emergency services are available when they are needed. This was a short-term isolated outage, and we immediately took measures to improve our network in order to prevent this type of event happening in the future. It added that we are moving on from the FCC's investigation and continuing our focus on our ongoing network build.

This week's settlement follows a cyberattack that T-Mobile disclosed to customers.

In August, the company said a data breach compromised the personal information of millions of current and prospective customers after a highly sophisticated cyberattack.