FCC investigating network outage

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating a T-Mobile network outage yesterday that impacted customers across the United States, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. He called the outage “unacceptable” and said the agency would “demand answers.” According to T-Mobile, an Internet Protocol traffic issue “created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day,” but was resolved by 10 p.m. PT.

The AHA received inquiries from the field regarding the outage and contacted senior government officials to determine the nature of the network disruption.

John Riggi, AHA senior advisor for cybersecurity and risk, encourages hospitals and health systems that experienced any patient care or other operational disruptions from the outage to contact him at jriggi@aha.org so he can advise the FCC. He added, “This may be a good time to check for redundancy in your emergency communications plans and incident response communications plans, especially if they rely solely on cellular.”