As a “trusted ally” in the government’s vast and unaccountable domestic surveillance programs, AT&T receives oodles of government favors. From broad and often mindless deregulation and massive deployment subsidies to $42 billion in tax breaks in exchange for doing absolutely nothing, the U.S. government adores slathering its patriotic partner with cash.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the company can’t do basic things properly, like keep the nation’s wireless callers connected to essential 911 emergency services.
Last February, a massive outage knocked AT&T wireless services offline for large swaths of the country, blocking more than 25,000 911 calls from being completed. Then the same thing happened in April, when a massive outage caused connectivity issues across South Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas. Now AT&T’s been fined $950,000 by the FCC for yet another 911 outage, this one from last April:
The FCC today announced a $950,000 settlement with AT&T to resolve an Enforcement Bureau investigation into whether the company violated FCC rules by failing to deliver 911 calls to, and failing to timely notify, 911 call centers in connection with an outage AT&T experienced on August 22, 2023, in parts of Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin.
AT&T, for what it’s worth, enjoys revenues of around $34 billion each quarter. This outage last year was apparently caused by an independent contractor that “inadvertently disabled a portion of the network” during unscheduled testing that didn’t adhere to existing protocols.
Keep in mind these outages are happening simultaneously with a series of hacks that have compromised the data of more than 73 million of its customers. And it comes as the company’s lobbyists work tirelessly to dismantle both federal and state oversight of telecom giants, including a recent Supreme Court Chevron decision that could ultimately destroy FCC oversight almost entirely.
At some point perhaps somebody in U.S. policy circles might be able to connect the mindless coddling of an unpopular, taxpayer money-slathered monopoly with the consistent sag in performance and network quality, but it may take another several decades of ugly hacks, financial fraud, consumer harms, or consistent 911 outages before somebody with a backbone and a brain connects the dots.
