Charter Communications fined $15 million over outage violations

Charter Communications has agreed to pay a $15 million civil penalty to settle an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) into compliance with network and 911 outage notification rules. The FCC found that Charter violated its rules by failing to notify public safety officials and the commission about three unplanned network outages and numerous scheduled maintenance-related outages in 2023. One significant incident in February 2023 was attributed to a minor denial of service attack on Charter’s network.

Charter expressed satisfaction in resolving the issues, stating that the penalty relates primarily to administrative notification failures rather than cybersecurity violations. The company must now report certain planned maintenance activities to the FCC. Additionally, Charter failed to notify over 1,000 emergency call centres about a service disruption impacting 911 services, which further violated the FCC’s outage reporting rules.

Why does this matter?

The settlement marks the first application of specific cybersecurity measures, including network segmentation and vulnerability mitigation management, about 911 communications services and network outage reporting. FCC regulations mandate that providers like Charter inform 911 call centres of outages exceeding 30 minutes that could affect these centres as quickly as possible.

The settlement follows other significant fines in the industry, including Verizon’s $1.05 million penalty for a December 2022 outage and T-Mobile’s $19.5 million settlement in 2021 for a massive 2020 outage. Recently, the FCC reported a nationwide AT&T outage in February that blocked over 92 million voice calls and hindered more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.