Residents of Washington state suffered through a 911 outage over a six-hour period last April because of computer mistakes, and now a state commission staff has recommended fines totaling $3 million against CenturyLink, who operates the state’s 911 network. The staff of the Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) also made recommendations to prevent future outages, including programming changes and more complete reporting of outages by CenturyLink to the state. The fines and staff recommendations must be approved by the three-member UTC before they could become effective. The outage began just before midnight on April 9th after mis-programmed computers operated by sub-contractor Intrado tripped error alarms which, in turn, had been mis-set to a low priority. Full 911 service was not restored to the state until about 6 a.m. the next day. CenturyLink said about 5,840 calls were not transmitted during the outage, although local officials say the outage didn’t create any serious consequences. Even so, one comm center manager told the UTC it was the state’s most extensive outage since 911 service became available in 1970. In its report released last week, the UTC staff said, “CenturyLink did not adequately provide the necessary safeguards to protect the state 911 system and had those safeguards been in place.” In addition, the staff determined that, “CenturyLink failed to provide prompt and critical information to PSAPs, hampering the PSAPs ability to reroute calls.” The report noted that CenturyLink and Intrado have already made “some changes” to address the computer programming glitch, and now monitor 911 call routing more effectively. However, the staff said that neither company has made “substantial changes” to balance 911 call processing between Intrado’s data centers in Colorado and Florida to limit future outages. Download (pdf) the full 56-page staff report for the details of the outage, diagrams of the state 911 system and the staff’s recommendations.
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