Charter to pay $15 million to resolve US probe into network outage rules

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Charter Communications will pay a $15 million civil penalty to resolve an investigation into compliance with network and 911 outage notification rules, the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday.

The FCC said Charter admitted to violating the agency’s rules on notifications to public safety officials and the commission in connection with three unplanned network outages and hundreds of scheduled maintenance-related network outages that occurred in 2023. The FCC said a February 2023 network outage was because Charter’s network was the target of a minor denial of service attack.

Charter said it was "glad to have resolved these issues, which will primarily result in Charter reporting certain planned maintenance to the FCC." The company added the fine "is attributable solely to administrative notifications" and not related to any cybersecurity violations.

The FCC said in one instance Charter failed to notify more than 1,000 emergency call centers of a service disruption impacting 911 service and failed to comply with the Commission’s outage reporting rules.

The FCC said the settlement includes a "first-of-its-kind application of certain cybersecurity measures—including network segmentation and vulnerability mitigation management—related to 911 communications services and network outage reporting."

FCC’s rules require providers, like Charter, to notify 911 call centers as soon as possible of outages longer than 30 minutes that potentially affect such call centers.

Last month, Verizon Communications' wireless business agreed to pay a $1.05 million fine to resolve an FCC investigation after a December 2022 outage lasted for one hour and forty-four minutes and prevented hundreds of 911 calls from completing through Verizon Wireless' network.

In 2021, the FCC said T-Mobile USA in 2021 agreed to settle an FCC probe for $19.5 million after a massive 2020 outage led to more than 20,000 failed 911 emergency calls.

Last week, the FCC said a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that lasted over 12 hours blocked more than 92 million voice calls and prevented more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler and Marguerita Choy)