(DailyDig.com) – On the evening of April 17, four states’ 911 emergency services were unavailable. Social media sites were used to announce the disabled emergency phone services.
Initially, the service failure affected Texas, Nevada, and South Dakota, but Nebraska also declared a service interruption. Reports came in from other states, leading to a rumor of widespread outages across the US. Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky, and Florida added to the initial four states reporting outages, and social media rumors began that a purge may be happening.
In California, the Sheriff’s Department in LA County announced that they knew of the seemingly widespread outages but informed their citizens that they would monitor the issue, but their service was in proper working order.
In Texas, several cities had outages, including Kilgore and Del Rio. The police department of Del Rio claimed that their outage was caused by their city system’s connection with their cellular carrier. The connection failure was related to the carrier and wasn’t a failure of their system, according to the police report.
Las Vegas, Nevada, reported that their 911 services from landlines were the problem and said that texting 911 was still available. The police announced that cellphone calls displayed the phone number, and 911 workers were able to call the person back. They reported the service restoration early on April 18.
The 911 system in South Dakota was the only state that confirmed their services were down statewide, but service returned to normal by the next morning. The police department in Rapid City said that the 911 service in Pennington County was receiving a massive number of calls from residents testing the operational status of the system. They warned citizens to stop making non-emergency calls, as they were making callbacks to as many as possible, and the unnecessary work may cause a delay or no response to a real emergency.
By April 18, all states had returned to normal emergency 911 service. The cause was not clear at that time regarding why so many service interruptions happened in the various states affected.
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