- Ofcom said failures led to 14,000 unsuccessful 999 calls
Regulators have fined BT £17.5million for being ‘ill-prepared’ when its emergency call handling service suffered a major disruption last year.
The telecoms giant, which manages the 999 system, sustained a network fault on 25 June last year, which lasted more than ten hours and led to almost 14,000 unsuccessful call attempts from 12,392 callers.
Ofcom said the ‘catastrophic failure’ started at 6:24am that day following an error in a configuration file on a server.
Penalty: Ofcom fined BT £17.5million for being ‘ill-prepared’ when its emergency call handling service suffered a major disruption last year
It resulted in staff being logged out of the system and calls being disconnected, dropped or put towards the back of the queue.
BT tried to switch to its disaster recovery platform just over an hour later, but Ofcom said this failed due to ‘poorly documented’ instructions.
Although the number of failed calls began declining once traffic was transferred to the platform from 8:50am, the network fault continued until just before 5pm.
Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s enforcement director, said: ‘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.
‘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.’
Ofcom began its investigation into the incident three days later to find out whether BT took the necessary measures to prepare for disruption to its network.
The media regulator found that the FTSE 100 firm lacked ‘sufficient warning systems’ and ‘adequate procedures’ to determine the extent and cause of the episode and identify mitigating actions.
In addition, it discovered BT’s disaster recovery platform lacked the ‘capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that might reasonably be expected’.
As a result, those with deaf and speech difficulties could not make calls, putting them at greater risk of harm.
While Ofcom noted there were no verified reports from the emergency authorities of ‘serious harm’ to the public, it has fined BT because the ‘potential degree of harm was extremely significant’.
BT shares were 0.4 per cent lower at 141.25p on Monday morning but have still risen by around 13 per cent since the year started.
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