Verizon will pay a $274,000 civil penalty for 911 outage [telecom]

Adopted: December 17, 2021 Released: December 17, 2021 By the Chief, Enforcement Bureau:

1. The Enforcement Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission has entered into a Consent Decree to resolve its investigation into a service-wide network outage experienced by Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless (Verizon) in May 2020 that resulted in failed calls to

911. Congress has made emergency communication services a national priority, and the Commission has repeatedly emphasized that robust and reliable 911 service must be available nationwide. It is therefore incumbent upon the Commission to ensure that telecommunications carriers provide reliable 911 service at all times. To settle this matter, Verizon will implement a compliance plan and pay a $274,000 civil penalty.

1. After reviewing the terms of the Consent Decree and evaluating the facts before us, we find that the public interest would be served by adopting the Consent Decree and terminating the referenced investigation regarding Verizon's compliance with sections 9.4 and 9.10(b) of the Commission's rules