WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - Verizon Communications' ( VZ )

wireless business will pay a $1.05 million fine to

resolve an investigation into whether the company violated

government rules by failing to deliver 911 calls during an

outage in six states in December 2022.

The FCC said the outage lasted for one hour and forty-four

minutes and prevented hundreds of 911 calls from completing

through Verizon Wireless' network and was similar to one that

Verizon Wireless experienced in October 2022.

The network outage impacted 911 traffic in Alabama, Florida,

Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

"We are committed to ensuring communications providers

uphold their responsibilities in providing critical 911 services

to the American public," said Loyaan A. Egal, chief of the FCC's

enforcement bureau.

Verizon agreed to pay the fine and under a consent decree

agreed to implement a robust compliance plan to ensure

compliance with the FCC's 911 rules.

"The incident in 2022 was a highly unusual occurrence,"

Verizon spokesman Rich Young said.

"We understand the critical importance of maintaining a

robust and reliable 911 network, and we're committed to ensuring

that our customers can always rely on our services in times of

need," Young added.

Verizon will perform 911 risk assessments and establish

enhanced processes for implementing security policy updates.

The December 2022 outage was the result of the reapplication

of a known flawed security policy update file by an employee

even though Verizon Wireless was aware that the version of the

security policy update file that caused the outage was related

to the root cause of the October outage, the FCC said.

Verizon Wireless did not remove the security policy update

file from its available security policies after the October

incident and admitted employees failed to comply with

"business-as-usual" operating and implementation procedures, it

added.