Dozens of police departments in at least 14 states report suffering temporary outages to 911 services as officials call for immediate investigation into cause of blackout
Law enforcement agencies across at least 14 states reported outages of their 911 systems Monday night, with the cause of the widespread disruption currently unclear.
Police departments from Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 phone systems and SMS text services were down shortly after 6:30pm.
Multiple reports also indicated that similar outages occurred throughout Delaware, California, North Carolina, North Dakota, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Washington, as well as Ohio.
The outage impacted all emergency services simultaneously, and 911 services were restored within 30 and 60 minutes for most affected counties.
Police departments from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning shortly after 6:30pm
The outages drew immediate scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency responsible for regulating communications services.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel called for the situation to be investigated immediately.
'The one system we need to work all the time is 911,' she wrote in a tweet. 'The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this now and figure out what is going on.'
The blackout may be linked to a crash of Microsoft 365 services also on Monday night, which restricted user's access to Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams including Teams Live Event.
Earlier Monday evening, the city of Redmond, Washington, where the software giant is based, noted city phone lines and email accounts were down due to the Microsoft outage, which started after 5pm ET.
On a status page for its cloud services, Microsoft acknowledged the widespread systems issue and said 'Any user may experience access problems for Microsoft 365 services.'
'We're working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly,' the company said.
Other suggest the 911 outage may instead be possibly traced back to a fault at a provider of Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs)
PSAPs are telephony systems where 911 emergency calls are terminated before reaching the actual emergency service call centers.
The blackout may be linked to a crash of Microsoft 365 services also on Monday night, which restricted user's access to Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams including Teams Live Event
While the source remains unclear, the Minneapolis Police Department in Minnesota, the Tucson Police Department in Arizona and the Delaware State Police were the first among dozens of agencies to report the outages.
Yavapai, Cochise, and Pima counties, as well as Flagstaff, reported experiencing issues with their 911 emergency lines in Arizona soon after.
In Nevada, the Washoe County Sheriff’s office tweeted that 911 services were down in Washoe County, Reno and Sparks.
The Grass Valley Police Department, located 60 miles Northeast of Sacramento in California reported an outage affecting 'some landlines and cell phones.'
'Please avoid testing your phone’s functionality by calling 911, as our dispatchers are working very hard to try and work through this stressful situation,' a Facebook post from the agency read.
Delaware State Police issued a statement on its website informing residents of the outage and technical issues with their 911 call services.
'Delaware State Police Dispatch Centers are currently experiencing a state wide interruption in service. Anyone attempting to call 911 either by cellphone or landline will experience a busy signal,' the agency said.
Around 30 minutes later, DSP said that their dispatch centers were fully operational again and were now able to receive 911 calls.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD said it was aware of the outages but said their department has so far been unaffected.
No comments: