AT&T Under Investigation Over 911 Outage, Keeps Its Mouth Shut

911 is an essential emergency service that is supposed to remain available no matter the time of day. However, the service went down for 5 hours on Wednesday, preventing users from multiple states from calling during an emergency. Now, the Federal Communications Commission has gotten involved and is investigating AT&T to find out exactly what happened. Unfortunately, the carrier is giving everyone the silent treatment.

Numerous local police and sheriff’s offices had to contend with the 911 outage on Wednesday night and had to provide citizens with alternate contact information in order to call emergency services, The Washington Post reports. Those affected were specifically customers of AT&T, which means that the outage happened on their end.

For now, the carrier is not releasing any kind of response on the matter, which already has the media buzzing. What could have caused such as a widespread outage of the country’s most essential contact number? The only thing that came out of the carrier was a statement that said 911 is back for customers to dial.

There aren’t any solid numbers with regards to the number of people affected by this outage, but some are saying that it could have been in the millions. If so, it wouldn’t be surprising since the issue did affect more than a dozen US states.

The outage is certainly being taken seriously as well since FCC Chairman Ajit Pai confirmed via Twitter that the agency was already looking into the matter, PC Mag reports. If this was still the previous administration, the AT&T would have faced fines if it was found that the error was some sort of blunder on their part.

With the current FCC, however, many are expecting that it would be surprising if the carrier got a slap on the wrist. For now, affected states can at least dial 911 again.