Ofcom fines BT £17.5m for ‘catastrophic’ failures in emergency calls

BT has been fined £17.5m by the watchdog Ofcom for being “ill-prepared” when its emergency call handling service suffered a major disruption last year.

The telecoms giant, which operates the 999 system, suffered a network failure on June 25 last year, which lasted more than ten hours and resulted in almost 14,000 failed call attempts from 12,392 people.

Ofcom said the “catastrophic failure” began at 6:24am that day following an error in a configuration file on a server.

This resulted in staff being logged out of the system and calls being disconnected, dropped or placed at the back of the queue.

BT attempted to switch to its disaster recovery platform just over an hour later, but Ofcom said this failed due to “poorly documented” instructions.

Although the number of failed calls began to decrease once traffic was transferred to the platform starting at 8:50 a.m., the network outage continued until shortly before 5 p.m.

Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s director of compliance, said: ‘Being able to contact emergency services can mean the difference between life and death, so in the event of any disruption to their networks, providers must be prepared to respond quickly and effectively.

‘In this case, BT failed to meet its responsibilities and was not well prepared to deal with such a large-scale disruption, putting its customers at unacceptable risk.

‘Today’s fine sends a broader warning to all companies: if they are not adequately prepared to deal with disruptions to their networks, we will hold them strictly to account on behalf of consumers.’

Ofcom began its investigation into the incident three days later to find out whether BT had taken the necessary steps to prepare for the disruption to its network.

The media regulator found the FTSE 100 company lacked “sufficient warning systems” and “appropriate procedures” to determine the scope and cause of the episode and identify mitigating actions.

It also found that BT’s disaster recovery platform lacked the “capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that could reasonably be expected.”

As a result, deaf and speech-impaired people were unable to make calls, putting them at greater risk of harm.

While Ofcom noted there were no verified reports from emergency authorities of “serious harm” to the public, it fined BT because “the potential degree of harm was extremely significant”.

BT shares were down 0.4 percent at 141.25 pence on Monday morning, but are still up around 13 percent since the start of the year.