Avoidable Coding Error Caused 911 Failure, Increased Scrutiny Needed, FCC Report Says

The transition to Internet Protocol-only communications networks needs increased scrutiny, an FCC bureau said upon completion of an investigation into a six-hour, multi-state 911 communications system failure.

At the Federal Communications Commission’s Oct. 17 open meeting, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler asked the FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to quickly return with a proposal on how the commission should address the outage and its causes.

The outage, which prevented 11 million people from being able to reach 911 centers for six consecutive hours in April, was the result of a single, preventable, computer coding error in a call-routing system ...