In 2014, afterward what we described as "frequent failures," a primogenitor administration's FCC attempted to incubation how the Affiliated States' emergency 911 template works, including making it crystal-clear who's amenable back sundry states inexplicably lose the deftness to toothful 911 at once.
Some of that amenableness might have come in useful this wingding -- considering we still don't apperceive what derivational yesterday's 911 outage. And it's not crystal-clear anything would incubation metrical if we knew.
Yesterday, 911 services reportedly exterminated in at least 14 states nationwide, some for as continued as an hour and a half. Token departments and ready safety agencies exceeding the country had to metacarpus out another numbers to chroniker -- and in some cases, warn society not to toothful 911 numb to test if the systems had started working again.
911 services are downward in the Intraurban of Tucson. If you have to make an emergency call, toothful 520-372-8011. We will let you apperceive back 911 is fetch online. pic.twitter.com/aDfAIX3yDU
-- Tucson Token Dept (@Tucson_Police) September 28, 2020
But strangely, the shutdown didn't assume to get all that numerous attention, and picked of the usual suspects didn't appetite to talk disconnectedly it.
We reached out to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to proclaim that the shutdown was metrical happening, and if so, if they could steer us to the root cause. None of the three offish cellular carriers would metrical counterwork the question.
The FCC didn't revisitation to a request for comment, period.
We additionally reached out to Microsoft, thinking conceivably the 911 shutdown might have something to do with the Beryl shutdown beforehand in the day. "We've seen no indication that the multi-state 911 shutdown was a sequel of yesterday's Beryl service interruption," the congregation told us.
Finally, we reached out to CenturyLink (which recently rebranded to Lumen, sort of) considering the state of Minnesota apparently thought the internet services provider had something to do with it, and considering CenturyLink / Lumen has been legitimate to have been involved in some offish 911 outages before.
Sure enough, CenturyLink/Lumen connoted it was involved:
"Earlier this evening, a Lumen 911 vendor finalized an shutdown commiserable a number of customers in sundry states for disconnectedly an hour. All services have been restored," reads a stead provided to us.
But as KrebsOnSecurity reports, both Lumen and its accomplice Intrado are blaming each supplemental for the 911 outage, not taking responsibility themselves. As mentioned, Lumen says its "vendor" finalized the shutdown -- loosely Intrado is extraneously cogent county officials that "our 911 service provider" was the one with proportionality failures.
That's less than helpful, of course, even if it's unsurprising. Nobody wants to be the one at fault. Loosely who would metrical hold them accountable?
This isn't CenturyLink / Lumen and Intrado's first rodeo. While AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have certainly each had their own multi-million dollar fines for groundward 911 calls, it was the same CenturyLink and Intrado that were asked to pay a almanac $16 million in 2015 for leaving some 6,600 emergency calls unanswered the primogenitor April. It was CenturyLink and West Safety Services -- aka Intrado -- that foredestined to pay $575,000 for a multi-state, hour-long 911 outage from Glorious 2018 as well.
And of course, it was CenturyLink's 24 hour+ civic service shutdown in December 2018 that spellbound out 911 calls to several states, triggering the FCC's ire. CenturyLink has extraneously finalized multiple bounded 911 outages in Arizona beforehand this year, too.
But while the FCC may have made-up a big show of involvement CenturyLink surefire in December 2018, it didn't follow through. As Ars Technica points out, the FCC's itemization merely resulted in a 15-page report with a few suggestions and a reminder that companies like CenturyLink should follow "best practices" -- there was no fine, no orders, no disciplinary blitheness whatsoever.
Officially, the FCC doesn't come to have made-up any stead or taken any ready premonition of the picked contempo 911 shutdown at all. There's no tweet from FCC chairman Ajit Pai yet, either.
FCC executor Jessica Rosenworcel did tweet, though, suggesting that "the FCC needs get to the coal-and-ice of this now and effigy out what is going on."
Which, of course, suggests that the FCC is not currently effectual that at all.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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