BT has been fined £17.5m over network disruption that affected 14,000 emergency calls and led to an “unacceptable risk”.
Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, said the penalty was linked to a network fault on Sunday 25 June last year.
It judged that while emergency services found no evidence of serious harm to the members of the public using the 999 emergency and 112 service during the disruption, there were a number of failures in BT’s handling of the situation.
“We also found that BT’s disaster recovery platform had insufficient capacity and functionality to deal with a level of demand that might reasonably be expected.
“The incident also caused disruption to text relay calls, which meant people with hearing and speech difficulties were unable to make any calls, including to friends, family, businesses and services. This left deaf and speech-impaired users at increased risk of harm.”
Ofcom’s report said BT’s emergency call handling system was initially disrupted by a “configuration error” in a file on its server.