Regulator Ofcom fines communications provider for period in which business customers were unable to call emergency services
In the event of a crisis, the emergency services are available 24/7 to help. But we need to be able to reach them – which the communications regulator Ofcom takes very seriously.
Photo by Miryam León / Unsplash
General Condition A3.2(b) of Ofcom’s rules says that companies provide call services must take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations.
The comms provider Vonage notified the regulator of an issue with it service: for the 11-day period between 23 October and 3 November 2023, Vonage’s UK VoIP business customers were unable to connect to the emergency lines 999 and 112 using their desk phones.
Ofcom duly investigated and discovered the cause was due to a software update. It found that Vonage’s internal processes did not include adequate assessment of whether such an update had the potential to impact emergency calls. This meant Vonage failed to test the lines following the update, to ensure everything worked as it should.
The regulator also found that Vonage did not have adequate monitoring procedures in place, so did not have sufficient oversight of its network to enable it to identify an outage affecting emergency calls.
In light of these serious failures, Ofcom concluded that Vonage was in breach of the general condition rule as above. The company has been fined £700,000, reduced from £1m because Vonage admitted liability and agreed to settle the case.
Since the issues came to light, Vonage has changed internal processes in various ways to prevent future errors. Ofcom will publish its full findings from the investigation in due course.
A spokesperson for Vonage says: ‘At Vonage, the trust of our customers is of the utmost importance to us, built upon transparency and reliability. We recognise the critical nature of the service we provide and the serious implications this disruption could have had. We sincerely apologise for the emergency calling outage. Our customers rightly expect more from us, and this incident fell short of the standards we hold ourselves to and our customers deserve.
‘We have taken this incident very seriously. Since it occurred, we have implemented a comprehensive set of corrective actions across our software development lifecycle intended to prevent such an issue from occurring again. The improvements now in place span development, testing, and deployment, and include enhanced quality assurance, proactive monitoring and alerting systems, and an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement.’
George Lusty, Enforcement Director at Ofcom, adds: ‘Being able to call the emergency services can mean the difference between life and death. It’s vital that telecoms providers take their responsibilities seriously and if they don’t, we’ll hold them to account. Vonage fell short on a number of levels, putting its customers at unacceptable risk.’
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