"Verizon has agreed to a $3.4 million settlement to resolve a Federal Communications Commission investigation into the company’s failure to meet its emergency call obligations during a multistate 911 service outage last year,” the FCC statement read.
On April 2014, the outage affected over 11 million people and nearly 83 emergency call centers in seven US states, according to the FCC statement.
Additionally, 750,000 California residents were left unable to reach a 911 live operator at 13 emergency call centers.
The settlement instructs Verizon to adopt a compliance plan with the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau program to create an "appropriate risk management process" to identify 911 call disruptions.
The plan should also seek to detect future outages, establish a response and recovery plan while protecting customers from future emergency call outages, according to the statement.
"Americans must have confidence that they will be able to reach 911 in an emergency," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in the statement.
"We will continue to work with providers to ensure that advances in 911 technologies lead to improved communications between citizens and first responders," Wheeler added.
