Last week, the central station that provides monitoring services to all of my companies’ subscribers, detected a loss of connectivity to M2M’s cloud receiving environment and notified M2M’s escalations team.
As I understand it, other providers also had problems. Critically, it was the central station, not the provider, who first detected the loss of functionality and notified M2M! What, if anything, did your central station do?
Against the foregoing backdrop, as of 10 p.m. ET, central station(s) lost full alarm and trouble signaling and the impact was experienced nationwide. Given that, subscribers who use M2M’s services also experienced an inability to remotely interact with their alarm panels.
In summary, subscribers whose alarm systems were equipped with M2M cellular units could not transmit alarm and trouble signals to central stations. Additionally, subscribers I spoke with did not recognize a correlation between the app not working and their alarm system no longer being monitored by the central station.
Based on this, it is likely that subscribers did not know their systems could no longer be monitored by the central station until the M2M network was restored.
Precisely, we were also advised by our central station that once the communication disruption was resolved, they anticipated receiving latent alarms and signals on scale and we were further advised that they would provide updates as they became available.
Additionally, M2M sent another message to my central station and stated:
As of 7:56 a.m., M2M is still actively investigating and working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Updates will be provided if more information becomes available…In the meantime, it is still not known whether any subscribers suffered a loss in which an alarm was activated but the central station did not receive any signals.
What is Foreseeable, Detectable and Preventable?
How important is notice to a subscriber when a central station identifies that the protected premises alarm system is impaired? Do you instruct your central station to log only and/or suppress notification to your subscribers when a system impairment is detected?
Is it your opinion that this benefits the security and life safety of your subscriber and/or their assets? If the central station detects an impairment with a cellular alarm services provider, and they notify alarm dealers for all of the affected subscribers, what is your company’s policy and procedure? Do nothing? Notify all the affected subscribers, or wait and see?
The professional and technical community of the alarm and central station industry knows that all providers of cellular alarm services go down from time to time, and depending on the central station that you use, emails are sent by the monitoring center notifying their alarm dealers that the cellular provider is down and that no signals are able to reach the central station.
At the same time, we also hear from many of our subscribers that their remote app or alarm system is not working. In response to these inquiries, we advise our subscribers that the cause of the problems they are having relates to the cellular units’ network going down and that we do not know how long the outage is going to last.
Given that, if an M2M subscriber’s burglar and/or fire alarm system activates during this period of time, no signals could be and/or would be transmitted to the central station. With this in mind, besides false alarms, what about the potential consequences to subscribers who were not notified and/or warned that their alarm system is not being monitored?
Simplified, it’s one thing not to have control over when the networks go down, and it’s another when notice could have been provided to subscribers so that they could make informed decisions. Does it matter? It surely depends on the fact pattern, but I would rather tell subscribers why I contacted them, instead of why I didn’t contact them.
Who’s Responsible When an Outage Happens?
In sum, the terms and conditions of many alarm installation and monitoring contracts oftentimes address that the alarm contractor is not responsible if the phone and/or internet and/or cellular networks go down because these services are not in our control and are provided by third parties.
Pivotally, whether or not these provisions will and/or will not limit liability in a particular case will certainly be handled on a case-by-case basis.
That said, what, if anything the professional and technical community of the alarm and central station industry does and/or does not do may also impact on the failure of the subscriber being notified.
The plaintiff could take the position that, but for receiving notice, the subscriber could have and/or would have acted differently by hiring a guard service to be stationed at their site until cellular services were reestablished or by checking their video surveillance system more often, or most importantly by instituting a fire watch until such time that the cellular alarm service is restored. or we can proactively focus on the benefit of “notice,” which currently is not something that is uniformly provided to subscribers.
