CenturyLink is facing $2.9 million in penalties for its responsibility in a statewide 911 system outage earlier this year.
The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) began an investigation after a statewide 911 outage severely disrupted emergency services for six hours, beginning at midnight on April 9 and continuing into the morning of April 10, 2014. All 6.9 million people living in Washington lost 911 service during the outage, which affected 5,840 911 calls placed from landline, wireless and Internet-based telephones.