FCC again fines Verizon $1 million for disconnected 911 calls. • The Register

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Verizon just over a million dollars for failing to route 911 calls during a cellular network outage.

The outage occurred on December 21, 2022, and knocked out calls to Verizon Voice over LTE (VoLTE) service in six southeastern states for one hour and 44 minutes. According to the FCC (PDF), Verizon failed to connect hundreds of callers to 911 call centers, which is not only bad for vulnerable people, but also illegal because Verizon is required to connect users to the service.

According to the FCC’s account, the December outage was very similar to the one Verizon experienced last October, and the telecom giant apparently made improvements to prevent another outage from happening again. However, the December outage apparently was not the result of Verizon’s insufficient mitigation measures, but rather the result of misnamed software, they say.

Verizon identified a particularly flawed security policy as one of the main causes of the October outages and replaced it with an entirely new one. However, the old security policy was not removed, only deactivated. The FCC says Verizon had “insufficient naming protocols,” indicating that the naming convention for security rules was ambiguous.

These factors allowed a Verizon employee to accidentally deploy the flawed security policy again. The FCC says the error should have been detected before the outage, but says Verizon employees did not provide adequate supervision as they should have. Thus, the reinstatement of the policy led to the December outage.

The FCC fined Verizon $1.05 million and ordered it to develop a compliance plan to ensure this does not happen a third time. The plan details several practices that Verizon should already be implementing, such as providing employees with a checklist to follow, testing proposed network changes before implementing them, and, of course, removing flawed security policies when they are discovered.

These security policies will also receive a new naming system that will be taken into account when creating policies to clearly identify which ones are the newest and which are old. Verizon will have to keep the FCC informed of its progress for the next three years, filing a report after the first 90 days, then after the first year, and then for a final time after three years.

The FCC typically takes 911 outages seriously, and its latest target is Lumen Technologies, which was responsible for a series of outages in April. Lumen paid a fine of $3.8 million in 2021, which means almost two days of profit based on 2023 results, another slap in the face.

“Providing exceptionally reliable connectivity, especially when callers need to contact emergency services, is a cornerstone of our company,” Verizon said Register.

“The incident that occurred in 2022 was a very unusual phenomenon. We understand how critical it is to maintain a robust and reliable 911 network, which is why we are committed to ensuring our customers can always rely on our services in times of need.” ®