OLYMPIA, Wash. – Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson says Centurylink is to blame for a major 9-1-1 outage in 2018.
Ferguson submitted testimony Thursday, December 16th, he says shows Centurylink’s fiber optic system failed in the early hours of December 27th.
Thousands of people across the state were unable to call 9-1-1 for nearly 50 hours.
In written statements, four people who were impacted by the outages said that they couldn’t adequately get the help they needed.
A Skagit County woman testified that she had to have a relative call 9-1-1 from another county and that the responding officers scolded her for not calling the appropriate county service.
Ferguson also found that outage was not the first that Centurylink was responsible for causing.
In 2014, a coding error left all of Washington without emergency service communications for 6 hours, a mistake Ferguson said was “preventable”.
The AG’s Public Counsel Unit is seeking $7.2 million in fines from Centurylink as a result of the two major outages.