BT fined £17.5 million for 'catastrophic failure' of 999 call system

Ofcom has fined BT £17.5 million after it failed to respond to a malfunction in its emergency call system that lasted more than 10 hours.

The regulator says BT suffered a network disruption in June 2023 lasting ten-and-a-half hours affecting 14,000 emergency calls from more than 12,000 callers.

Ofcom said the telecoms giant lacked "sufficient warning systems", and that it did not have "adequate procedures" to assess and mitigate the outage.

The error led to handlers being logged out, calls being disconnected or dropped once transferred to the emergency services, and calls being returned to the queue.

It added that the disruption was found to be a configuration error in a file on BT's server, which caused call handlers' systems to restart as they received a call during the first hour of the crisis.

BT was unable to find the cause of the issue and attempted to switch to its disaster recovery platform after around an hour.

This procedure failed because of "human error", as a result of "instructions being poorly documented, and the team being unfamiliar with the process", Ofcom says.

The company launched the disaster recovery platform successfully more than two hours after the issue started, but the usual service was not restored as the platform "struggled with demand".

The issue lasted from 6:24AM to 4:56PM on June 25 last 2023.

Suzanne Carter, 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.”

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