Telecoms group BT has been fined £17.5m after the “catastrophic failure” of its emergency call system left thousands of people unable to get through to emergency services despite dialing 999.
Regulator Ofcom said BT suffered a network disruption in June 2023 that lasted more than 10 hours and affected 14,000 emergency calls from 12,392 people.
The watchdog said BT did not have “sufficient warning systems” in place, that it did not have “adequate procedures” to assess the severity or impact of the outage, or to work out how to mitigate it.
Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, said: “Being able to contact the emergency services can mean the difference between life and death, so in the event of any disruption to their networks, providers must be ready to respond quickly and effectively.
“In this case, 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.”
Ofcom found that BT experienced a network fault that affected its ability to connect calls to emergency services. The error, later found on its computer server, resulted in call handlers’ systems restarting as soon as a call was received; agents being logged out of the system; calls being disconnected or dropped upon transfer to police, fire or ambulance services and calls being put back in the queue.
BT, initially unable to work out the cause of the issue, attempted to switch to a disaster recovery platform but the move made the situation worse. Ofcom said human error meant the first attempt to switch to the disaster recovery platform was unsuccessful. It found instructions were “poorly documented” and the team asked to do it were “unfamiliar with the process”.
As a result the incident grew from affecting some calls to a total outage of the system.
Once the disaster recovery system was up and running the rate of unsuccessful calls fell but Ofcom found that usual service was not fully restored as the disaster recovery platform struggled with demand.
The incident also caused disruption to text calls resulting in people with hearing and speech difficulties being unable to make any calls, including to friends, family, businesses and services. This left deaf and speech-impaired users at increased risk of harm, Ofcom said.
BT has been contacted for comment.