Washington utility regulators want CenturyLink to pay a $2.9 million penalty for a six-hour 911 outage on April 9 and 10.
CenturyLink, in a statement, said the problems were with one of the company’s vendors and added it is “troubled by the punitive nature” of the fine.
Commission staff recommended Tuesday that CenturyLink be penalized for 11,731 violations of state law and commission rules. Most of the violations result from a failure to reroute 911 calls and a failure to promptly notify dispatch centers of the outage.
The outage took 911 service offline for all of Washington’s 6.9 million residents, according to the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, which says the outage affected landline phones, cellphones and even Internet calling.
In one case, the Associated Press reported, an Everett woman said she made 37 calls about an intruder breaking into her home and had to drive him away herself with a knife.
Washington contracts with CenturyLink to manage its 911 services, and CenturyLink outsources some elements of that business to a Colorado contractor called Intrado. The utilities commission and CenturyLink both say the April outage resulted from problems in an Intrado data center.
CenturyLink said it began working with public safety agencies as soon as Intrado notified it of the issue.
“We value customer safety and make reliable 911 communications a top priority,” CenturyLink said in a written statement. “Given that this was a vendor problem, that the problem had never occurred before, that it was corrected promptly, and that steps have been taken to ensure it does not happen again, CenturyLink is troubled by the punitive nature of the fine recommended by the WUTC staff.”
The 911 outage affected six other states — California, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. CenturyLink also suffered a 911 outage in northwest Oregon last spring, but the company said that was an unrelated issue caused by a maintenance problem.
