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Ofcom has fined BT £17.5m for being ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic failure of its emergency call handling service last summer, where over a ten hour period it failed to connect over 12,000 999 callers to the emergency services.
BT has a legal obligation to connect 999 and 112 calls in the UK and provides relay services for deaf and speech-impaired people. On 25 June 2023, a network fault affected BT’s ability to connect calls to emergency services between 06:24 and 16:56. During the incident, nearly 14,000 call attempts – from 12,392 different callers – were unsuccessful.
“BT fell woefully short of its responsibilities and was ill-prepared to deal with such a large-scale outage, putting its customers at unacceptable risk.”
Suzanne Cater, Director of Enforcement, Ofcom.
As a result of the outage, the telecoms regulator Ofcom opened an investigation to see if BT had failed to comply with its legal duties to take appropriate and proportionate measures to prepare for potential disruption to its network.
A year long investigation concluded that BT did not have sufficient warning systems in place for when this kind of incident occurs, nor did it have adequate procedures for promptly assessing the severity, impact and likely cause of any such incident or for identifying mitigating actions.
The regulator also found that BT’s disaster recovery platform had insufficient capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that might reasonably be expected. Ofcom documented the attempts by BT to switch to its disaster recovery platform and how a combination of human error, poor documentation and lack of familiarity with the process delayed the switchover. Once that had taken place, the platform struggled with demand in the initial stages, adding further delay to resuming a full service to the public.
The incident also caused disruption to text relay calls, which meant people with hearing and speech difficulties were unable to make any calls, including to friends, family, businesses and services. This left deaf and speech-impaired users at increased risk of harm.
Commenting on the level of the fine, Ofcom said that while there had been no confirmed reports of harm to the public as a result of the incident, ‘the potential degree of harm was extremely significant.’
“Today’s fine sends a broader warning to all firms -– if you’re not properly prepared to deal with disruption to your networks, we’ll hold you to strict account on behalf of consumers.”
Suzanne Cater,Director of Enforcement, Ofcom.
The financial penalty of £17.5 million on BT was set based on Penalty Guidelines and must be paid within two months. The fine includes a 30 per cent discount as a result of BT’s admission of liability and agreement to settle the case.
Ofcom has published more detail on the outage including detailed references to legal obligations.
