UK regulator Ofcom has fined BT Group £17.5 million ($22.6m) after a technical fault heavily impacted its ability to handle emergency calls last year.
Ofcom said that BT was "ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic failure of its emergency call handling service," during a period that lasted for around 11 hours.
On June 25, 2023, the carrier suffered from a network fault that impacted its ability to connect calls to emergency services between 06:24 and 16:56.
According to Ofcom, nearly 14,000 call attempts were made during this time period, from 12,392 different callers, but were all unsuccessful.
"Being able to contact the emergency services can mean the difference between life and death, so in the event of any disruption to their networks, providers must be ready to respond quickly and effectively," said Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s director of enforcement.
"In this case, BT fell woefully short of its responsibilities and was ill-prepared to deal with such a large-scale outage, putting its customers at unacceptable risk. Today’s fine sends a broader warning to all firms -– if you’re not properly prepared to deal with disruption to your networks, we’ll hold you to strict account on behalf of consumers."
BT notified Ofcom of the issue as required by law, prompting Ofcom to open an investigation three days after the incident.
At the time, BT blamed the incident on a complex software issue, which caused a caching issue that resulted in impacted calls not being routed correctly and the user’s call being disconnected.
Ofcom's investigation found that BT did not have sufficient warning systems in place for such an incident, nor did it have adequate procedures for promptly assessing the severity, impact, and likely cause of any such incident or for identifying mitigating actions.
The regulator did note that BT had fully cooperated with its investigation and has sought to improve its processes to deal with any similar incidents in the future.
"We take great pride in underpinning the national 999 service and recognize the critical importance our infrastructure plays. The level of disruption to the service on Sunday 25 June last year has never been seen before and we are sincerely sorry for the distress caused. We accept the specific points raised in Ofcom’s findings, and have put in place comprehensive measures to prevent this series of events from reoccurring and improve end-to-end resilience of the system as a whole," a BT spokesperson told DCD.
“While no technology is 100 percent resilient, we have built a highly robust network with multiple layers of protection to connect the public to blue light services in their time of need. We take our responsibility to the emergency services and the public seriously, and on this occasion, we fell short of our own high standards for the 999 service.”
