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US Telco Fined $3 Million in Domain Renewal Blunder (bleepingcomputer.com)

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Sorenson Communications, a Utah-based telecommunications provider, received a whopping $3 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week for failing to renew a crucial domain name used by a part of the local 911 emergency service. The affected service was the Video Relay System (VRS), a video calling service that telecommunication firms must provide to deaf people and others people with vocal disabilities so they can make video calls to 911 services and use sign language to notify operators of an emergency or crime. According to the FCC, on June 6, Sorenson failed to notice that the domain name on which the VRS 911 service ran had expired, leading to the entire system collapsing shortly after. Utah residents with disabilities were unable to reach 911 operators for almost three days, the FCC discovered. Sorensen noticed its blunder and renewed the domain three days later, on June 8.

1 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They can't count, either. by Glarimore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can see why they may have made this mistake.

    Yes, 8 - 6 = 2, but we can assume that if the issue began on the 6th and was resolved on the 8th, then service was affected for three business days. I'm sure that point (business days of outage) has been made multiple times. I can imagine the author overlooking their error due to thinking, "If service was affected for three days, then the issue must not have been fixed until three days later." This is an especially easy error to make if you're leaving date or numeric placeholders in an article as you're writing it.

    Anyway, I think we should be less hard on summary and article authors for simple arithmetic errors like this (that doesn't mean editors shouldn't be doing their due diligence, though).