Sprint now owes the FCC a hefty chunk of change following the agency’s decision to hit it with a $1.2 million fine. The FCC announced today that it has fined Sprint because the big yellow carrier messed up 911 calls for hearing-impaired citizens for a six-month period.

From March 28 through September 18 of 2014, Sprint customers using the Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service (IP CTS) were unable to make calls to 911. If they tried using the service, which provides a sort of closed captioning to the caller, their call wouldn’t go through. Sprint also continued to collect an FCC subsidy for keeping the service up and running during this time.

So now Sprint needs to pony up $1.2 million, and it’s also pledged to pay back the cash that it took from the FCC for keeping the service running when it actually wasn’t. Having access to 911 service is super-important, which is why Sprint is being forced to write the FCC a check for more than $1 million for this six-month outage.