Securus Responds to Unprecedented Weather Related Service Outage at Data Center in Dallas, Texas

Minimizes Outage By Mobilizing +200 Associates Throughout the United States.

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Jun 02, 2015, 10:10 ET

DALLAS, June 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Securus Technologies, a leading provider of civil and criminal justice technology solutions for public safety, investigation, corrections and monitoring, announced details of a service outage on Friday, May 29, 2015.

On Friday morning, May 29, 2015 – the Dallas, Texas area endured another significant round of bad weather including severe flooding, lightning, and power outages that have resulted in the deaths of 27 throughout the state and thousands of homes flooded. At approximately 3:30 a.m., Securus lost cooling that is provided by its data center management company. That company provides all key electric, heating, ventilation, and cooling to many carrier grade customers in its data center located in Dallas, Texas. Normally, this cooling would have been restored within minutes – but the flooding caused a longer response time – Securus' equipment overheated (> 120 degrees F), and we had to take the extraordinary measure of shutting down the data centers to avoid a catastrophic situation that would extend the service outage.

"It is never good to have a service outage that negatively impacts our prison/jail customers, inmates, and friend/family members – that is unacceptable from our perspective," said Richard A. ("Rick") Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Securus Technologies. "But we responded quickly with over 200 Securus Associates (Employees) throughout the United States to turn down our equipment in a deliberate/programmed way, diagnose problems, notify our customers, repair hardware and software, and turn our equipment back up. As a result of our actions, we turned a multiple day potential service outage to an outage that was corrected within the same day. Given the "once in a century" weather including massive flooding, and significant loss of life in Texas, the work that we accomplished was extraordinary."

"Normally, we complete over 400,000 calls from inmates to friends/family members in a day and we only completed 170,000 calls on Friday. Many of those calls shifted to Saturday and Sunday which is good – as the communications were completed, albeit late."

"We haven't had a significant outage like this in years," said Smith. "It is our job to take extraordinary measures to be sure our network operates flawlessly. Having even one (1) customer facility down is unacceptable for us, but I have learned in 43 years of doing this that Mother Nature ultimately rules, and she surely did not cooperate this time. The Securus Team reacted well: quickly, safely, and prevented an even larger service disruption."

Some of the things that happened behind the scenes are:

Replacement of switch/router/server electronic cards that cost over $1 million;
Hiring a private jet that delivered an emergency set of cards to Dallas from Oregon;
Many Securus Associates working +24 hours shifts;
Securus Sales and Service Associates contacting and updating 2,600 facilities during the outage;
Turning down then up thousands of pieces of electronic equipment worth several hundred million dollars in order to minimize the time of the service outage;
Mobilizing 200 Securus Associates to respond to service issues.

"I apologize to those correction officials, inmates, and friends/family members for any inconvenience that the outage caused you. I pledge that we will always give you our best, there is no doubt," said Smith.

ABOUT SECURUS TECHNOLOGIES
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and serving more than 2,600 public safety, law enforcement and corrections agencies and over 1,000,000 inmates across North America, Securus Technologies is committed to serve and connect by providing emergency response, incident management, public information, investigation, biometric analysis, communication, information management, inmate self-service, and monitoring products and services in order to make our world a safer place to live. Securus Technologies focuses on connecting what matters^®. To learn more about our full suite of civil and criminal justice technology solutions, please visit SecurusTechnologies.com.

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SOURCE Securus Technologies, Inc.