T-Mobile agrees to pay $20M settlement after outage resulted in failed 911 calls

Wireless carrier T-Mobile has agreed to pay nearly $20 million in a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after an outage resulted in thousands of failed 911 calls, The Associated Press reported.

The agency announced Tuesday that T-Mobile will also commit to improving communications of outrages to emergency call centers as part of its settlement. 

The FCC said it was a “complete failure” that thousands of 911 calls didn’t go through due to the outage, adding there were calls that did go through but without key information such as callback numbers and location data, according to the AP. 

A 12-hour nationwide outage from T-Mobile caused more than 23,000 failed 911 calls in June 2020. 

The agency added the outage began due to a failure from the wireless carrier, which was made worse by routing and software errors. 

T-Mobile also paid a $17.5 million fine after two related network outages happened on the same day in August 2014, the AP noted.