FCC Probes Nationwide CenturyLink Outage, Cites 911 Service Disruption
December 28 2018 - 6:01PM
Dow Jones News
By Nour Malas and Sarah Krouse
The Federal Communications Commission is investigating what its
chairman called a "completely unacceptable" nationwide service
outage at telecommunications company CenturyLink Inc., which
disrupted 911 emergency-response call operations and temporarily
shut down banks, courtrooms, and businesses around the country.
The outages began Thursday, affecting service from Massachusetts
to Washington state. The outage also suspended cellphone and
internet services by other providers, including Verizon
Communications Inc., which rely on CenturyLink for network
connectivity in some places.
In addition to disrupted 911 calls, the outage cut a wide swath.
State District Court in Albuquerque, New Mexico closed after four
hours of work on Thursday because systems went offline. The Idaho
Central Credit Union said its ATMs stopped working Thursday, but
were operational Friday.
Some states said 911 service was restored Friday morning, but
others reported continued interruptions.
CenturyLink said it had identified a "network element" and some
other technical problems disrupting services, which it was working
to restore. The company didn't elaborate on the problems beyond
saying they weren't caused by a cyberattack. It also said that
while service disruptions on its network continued Friday, 911
calls were going through where CenturyLink is the 911 service
provider.
From Edina, Minn., to Bellevue, Wash., cities and police
departments sent out messages on social-media warning of the outage
and instructing people to use ten-digit numbers for emergency calls
instead of 911, or to text-to-911 services where available.
CenturyLink urged customers in a Twitter post to "drive to the
nearest fire station or emergency facility" if they couldn't get
through by phone.
The breadth of the outage underscored the fragility of the
nation's 911 system, as well as the vulnerability of interconnected
telecommunications systems. CenturyLink helps some wireless
carriers connect parts of their network, for example, linking cell
towers to switches to transmit data.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement Friday said the outage is
"completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are
particularly troubling." Mr. Pai directed the FCC's Public Safety
and Homeland Security Bureau to start an investigation, which will
also look at the effect CenturyLink's outage "appears to have had
on other providers' 911 services."
A CenturyLink spokeswoman said, "We take all service
interruptions seriously and have had teams working around the clock
to restore affected services." She added the company is in contact
with the FCC and policy makers and will cooperate fully with any
investigation.
Shortly after 10 p.m. Thursday, Christy Williams, director of
911 for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, heard that
one of the 41 emergency call centers in the region she oversees had
stopped receiving calls.
Eventually the problems extended to all of those centers, which
serve 14 counties, spurring social-media posts to the public and
work with vendors to bring the system back up. The problem
continued until about 5:30 a.m., but went out again two hours
later.
"When you've been in an outage situation and you're up and then
you go back down, there's a lack of peace of mind," said Ms.
Williams. "We're all still in the war room working together with
communications and our vendors," she said.
A spokeswoman for 911 trade group the National Emergency Number
Association said this outage, as with past ones, "highlights the
urgent need to transition America's 9-1-1 centers to more robust
and resilient next generation 9-1-1 networks" that can route calls
around outages and use backup facilities.
The U.S.'s 911 system receives 240 million calls a year and
consists of more than 5,700 different call centers in counties,
parishes and towns across the country. Each 911 call center has
varying degrees of technology at its disposal, with some heavily
reliant on landlines. Others rely on internet-based technology.
Write to Nour Malas at nour.malas@wsj.com and Sarah Krouse at
sarah.krouse@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 28, 2018 17:46 ET (22:46 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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