Investing.com -- Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) agreed on Wednesday to pay the Federal Communications Commission a fine of $3.4 million to settle a lengthy investigation regarding its failure to meet its emergency call obligations during a multistate 911 outage last spring.
The April, 2014 outage affected more than 11 million people and more than 75 emergency call centers in seven states. Customers in nine counties in California, in particular, were unable to access the call centers for a period of six hours. The outage in Northern California impacted approximately 750,000 Verizon customers.
"Americans must have confidence that they will be able to reach 911 in an emergency," FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement. "We take seriously our obligation to ensure the nation's 911 systems function reliably. We will continue to work with providers to ensure that advances in 911 technologies lead to improved communications between citizens and first responders."
Verizon, the nation's largest wireless communications service, dropped 0.20 or 0.41% to 48.75 in U.S. afternoon trading.
As part of a consent decree reached with the FCC, Verizon agreed to monitor its 911 subcontractors more closely.