CenturyLink, West Safety to Pay $575,000 to Resolve FCC 911 Probe

compliance plan, the FCC said Monday. The 65-minute outage occurred when a West Safety Services technician mistakenly made a configuration change to the 911 routing network, resulting in many calls failing to route properly to 911 centers, the FCC said. In June, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission voted 5-0 to require more 911 reporting by CenturyLink after a state probe into the 911 outage (see 1906130053). “The August 2018 event was caused by a third-party vendor’s employee error,” a CenturyLink spokesperson emailed. “We quickly notified public safety officials in impacted areas,” then “focused our efforts on future reliability by working closely with our vendor to ensure improved processes were implemented to prevent this type of error from recurring.” FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said the FCC should have hit CenturyLink harder, especially as a repeat offender (see 1504060050). The settlement “does not address the repeat nature of the outages, and in fact the consent decree fails to even mention the 2015 action,” he said: “Today’s consent decree re-adopts measures previously instituted, including designating a compliance officer and developing and implementing a compliance plan reflecting industry best practices. Notably, even though the consent decree assigns fault for the outage at issue here to a subcontractor, the compliance plan contains nothing about better coordination and supervision of such parties.”