Ofcom fines BT £17.5m for ‘catastrophic failure’ of emergency call system

Regulators have fined BT £17.5 million for failing to respond to a more than 10-hour outage of its emergency call system last summer. 

Ofcom said on Monday that the telecoms giant suffered a network disruption in June 2023 which lasted 10-and-a-half hours and hit 14,000 emergency calls from 12,392 callers. 

The watchdog said BT did not have “sufficient warning systems” in place, and that it did not have “adequate procedures” to assess the severity or impact of the outage, or to work out how to mitigate it.

Ofcom said the disruption was found to be a configuration error in a file on BT’s server, which caused call handling agents’ systems to restart as soon as they received a call during the first hour of the crisis.

By Alex Daniel.
Full story at Yahoo News.