Charter failed to notify 911 call centers and FCC about VoIP phone outages

Charter Communications agreed to pay a $15 million fine after admitting that it failed to notify more than a thousand 911 call centers about an outage caused by a denial-of-service attack and separately failed to meet the Federal Communications Commission's reporting deadlines for hundreds of planned maintenance outages.

"As part of the settlement, Charter admits to violating the agency's rules regarding notifications to public safety officials and the Commission in connection with three unplanned network outages and hundreds of planned, maintenance-related network outages that occurred last year," the FCC said in an announcement yesterday.

A consent decree said Charter admits that it "failed to timely notify more than 1,000 PSAPs [Public Safety Answering Points] of an outage on February 19, 2023." The decree notes that failure to notify the PSAPs, or 911 call centers, "impedes the ability of public safety officials to mediate the effects of an outage by notifying the public of alternate ways to contact emergency services."