Telecoms company not fined for tenth 999 outage

Tuesday 13 February 2024

The island's largest telecoms provider has not been fined for an outage two years ago that prevented islanders from calling emergency services for two hours, after an investigation found that the company had taken steps to address the technical failure and improve emergency call services.

During the outage between 00:00 and 02:00 on 9 December 2022, JT’s emergency call handling platform failed, causing all emergency calls to go unanswered.

JT tried to implement backup procedures but could not successfully divert calls to the Emergency Services Control Centre until 02:00.

During the outage, JT arranged for Jersey Police to follow up with unsuccessful emergency callers.

It wasn't the first time there had been an outage – in November 2023, JT was fined £380,000 for an outage in 2022 which left islanders unable to call emergency services for almost an hour, which the watchdog said could have had "potentially life-threatening consequences". It was the ninth incident since 2020.

Following an investigation into the December 2022 outage, the Jersey Competition and Regulatory Authority confirmed yesterday that it had chosen not to issue another fine.

Pictured: The watchdog cited the company's efforts to prevent such failures in the future as the reason for not imposing a penalty.

Tim Ringsdore, CEO of watchdog, said: “Emergency service calls, by their nature, are urgent. Whilst JT arranged for unsuccessful callers to be contacted by the Police, any delay in the emergency services response has the potential to exacerbate an already serious situation. 

“Since the incident, JT has taken numerous steps to improve the Jersey’s public emergency call service including the migration of the call handling to a new platform and the active participation in Jersey’s 999 liaison committee.

"Due to this work, the Authority decided not to impose a direction or a financial penalty on JT in this case.”

In response to the various 999 incidents in recent years, the JCRA announced in June that a new committee had been set up to monitor and improve the quality of Jersey's emergency call service line.