FCC Requests Reports of PSAP Communications Outages

On June 11, 2013, the FCC established the email address psapreport@fcc.gov for PSAPs to report communications failures and outages directly to the FCC. Public safety is seriously jeopardized when PSAPs lose commercial service and/or experience communications outages. The FCC already obtains information on many communications outages.  However, that information does not cover how the PSAPs perceive these events and does not include events that happen at the PSAP. 

 

The FCC is looking to collect outage information from PSAPs directly. If this information was shared among a large percentage of PSAPs, some common problems might be discovered early and corrective actions implemented.

The type information the FCC would like includes:

• Date and time of the event including duration
• What services were affected
• Description of what failed
• Generic cause of the failure, e.g., hardware failure, power failure, software failure, etc.
• Name of communication provider
• Assessment of repair process

Any additional information that the PSAP thinks is relevant to the outage the FCC greatly appreciates. So, please send outage information to psapreport@fcc.gov. 

For further information, please contact John Healy, Associate Chief, Cybersecurity and Communications Reliability Division, at (202) 418-2448 or john.healy@fcc.gov. In addition to providing the FCC with outage information to psapreport@fcc.gov, PSAPs may continue to contact the FCC’s Operations Center if they need immediate assistance by calling (202) 418-1122 at any time.