The Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday that it had settled a case involving AT&T wireless customers who were not able to access 911, in some cases for hours, in several states in 2017. AT&T Mobility will pay a $5.25 million fine and take steps to make sure the problem doesn't occur again, the agency said.
The 911 outages occurred in March and May 2017 when the Dallas-based company was making changes to its network, the FCC said in a news release. During the March outage, which lasted for five hours, about 12,600 calls to 911 were unable to get through, it said. In the May outage, which lasted 47 minutes, there were 2,600 failed calls.
In the March outage, North Texas cities from Dallas to Arlington to Plano reported problems. Local police departments advised callers to use the non-emergency numbers if they needed to immediate help.
