BT receives significant fine after emergency call handling "failures"

The UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has fined BT £17.5 million for being “ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic failure of its emergency call handling service.”

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According to Ofcom, the fine follows an incident which took place on June 25 of last year, during which BT experienced “a network fault that affected its ability to connect calls to emergency services between 06:24 and 16:56.” During that time, nearly 14,000 call attempts from 12,392 callers, were reported as being unsuccessful.

The UK regulator describes the incident taking place in three phases. The first of these took place from 06:24 to 07:33, when BT’s emergency call handling system was disrupted by what was later found to be a configuration error in a file on its server.

“This resulted,” said Ofcom, “in call handling agents’ systems restarting as soon as a call was received; agents being logged out of the system; calls being disconnected or dropped upon transfer to the emergency authorities; and calls being put back in the queue.”

BT was initially unable to determine the cause of the issue and attempted to switch to its disaster recovery platform. 'Phase two' of the incident – which took place from 07:33 to 08:50 – witnessed BT’s first attempt at this, something which proved unsuccessful “due to human error.” Ofcom states that this was due to instructions being “poorly documented and the team being unfamiliar with the process.”