14 DAY TRIAL // For four hours on what seemed to be a normal April day last year, 6600 emergency calls from people throughout seven states couldn't get through to responders due to a 911 outage.
The service interruption ended up affecting 11 million people in seven states, and a few months later a FCC report revealed that everything could have been prevented.
It seems like major US carrier Verizon also played a big part in the whole equation. According to the FCC, the company failed to attend to its responsibility of notifying officials the outage was happening.
So Verizon is now being fined with $3.4 / €3.21 million for the 750,000 residents of California that were affected throughout the happening.
According to regulations, service providers such as Verizon are obliged to reach out to Public Safety Answering Points when noticing an outage.
In its defense, Verizon blamed everything on a subcontractor that was responsible with routing the emergency calls, claiming that said entity did not alert them the service wasn't functioning properly.
However, this argument did not impress the FCC, which decided to go ahead and impose the fine anyway. From now on, Verizon is also required to install a so-called “far-reaching compliance plan” in order to ensure something like this does not happen again.