BT has been fined £17.5m over network disruption that affected 14,000 emergency calls and led to an “unacceptable risk”.
Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, said the penalty was linked to a network fault on Sunday 25 June last year.
The disruption lasted for more than 10 hours.
It judged that while emergency services found no evidence of serious harm to the members of the public using the 999 emergency and 112 service during the disruption, there were a number of failures in BT’s handling of the situation.
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“We found that BT did not have sufficient warning systems in place for when this kind of incident occurs, nor did it have adequate procedures for promptly assessing the severity, impact and likely cause of any such incident or for identifying mitigating actions,” Ofcom said.
“We also found that BT’s disaster recovery platform had insufficient capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that might reasonably be expected.
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“The incident also caused disruption to text relay calls, which meant people with hearing and speech difficulties were unable to make any calls, including to friends, family, businesses and services. This left deaf and speech-impaired users at increased risk of harm.”
Ofcom’s report said that BT’s emergency call handling system was initially disrupted by a “configuration error” in a file on its server.
A switch to its disaster recovery platform was delayed by human error, the watchdog said.
It added that the back-up system struggled to meet demand.
Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, 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.
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“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 said that BT self-reported the incident and had cooperated in full.
It added that the company had taken steps to remedy the issues identified.
