This work accesses the efficacy of a regulatory reporting threshold for telecommunication outages by examining various thresholds and threshold types for optimality. The FCC has set this survivability threshold such that only outages affecting at least 30,000 customers for minimum 30 minutes are reportable. Such a threshold is termed “AND”. A new type threshold is also defined, which is bound by a hyperbolic locus and named “PRODUCT”. An empirical investigation is performed using a large number of local telecommunication switch outages above and below the FCC threshold to assess threshold optimality. Outage impact is the basis for analysis and two different measurement metrics are used, namely Prime Lost Line Hours and Outage Index. An optimal threshold requires maximizing exposed loss and minimizing reported events. Consequently, a new parameter, Threshold Figure of Merit, is defined that measures the efficiency of different thresholds relative to the FCC AND threshold. PRODUCT thresholds are found more efficient than AND thresholds, one of which is 54 % better than FCC threshold.