News
Multiple 911 outages were reported in across four states yesterday, but the cause of the outages remains unclear.
By: Brad Randall, Broadband Communities
First responders in cities across the U.S. experienced 911 outages yesterday evening, leading to major disruptions for some public safety departments.
Cities like Las Vegas, Henderson, Rapid City, and Del Rio in Texas fell victim to the outage, which reportedly disabled some 911 call-center functions, according to various social media posts. Authorities in South Dakota, with that state’s public safety department, announced that texting to 911 services remained operational during the outage.
Outages or disruptions to 911 services were reported in Texas, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota.
In Rapid City, services were restored several hours after the first issues were reported.
Police in Del Rio called the incident “an outage with a major cellular carrier affecting the ability to reach 911.”
Authorities in that city said the issue was with the carrier “and not the City of Del Rio systems.”
Updates about the cause of the outage have been scant. In a Thursday morning post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Federal Communications Commision (FCC) posted they “are aware of reports of 911-related outages and we are currently investigating.”
In a Thursday statement released to the media, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel doubled down on the commission’s pledge to investigate.
“When you call 911 in an emergency, it is vital that call goes through,” Rosenworcel said. “The FCC has already begun investigating the 911 multi-state outages that occurred last night to get to the bottom of the cause and impact.”
Along with South Dakota, Texas, and Nevada, localities in Nebraska were also affected, like Chase County, which said landline calls were not impacted but mobile calls to 911 were.
The Chase County Sherriff’s office, yesterday evening, posted on Facebook that “911 is down across the State of Nebraska again for all cellular carriers except T-Mobile.:
Authorities in that county didn’t post that services were restored until this morning, approximately 12 hours later.
The Department of Homeland Security has previously warned about the risk of cyberattacks on “Next Generation 911 (NG911) systems.”
The NG911 networks “operate on an Internet Protocol (IP) platform, enables interconnection on with a wide range of public and private networks, such as wireless networks, the Internet, and regular phone networks,” according to a Dept. of Homeland Security document detailing the cyber risks to NG911 systems.
The systems provide “new vectors for attack” to malicious parties, the department has warned.
“As cyber threats grow in complexity and sophistication, attacks could be more severe against an NG911 system as attackers can launch multiple distributed attacks with greater automation from a broader geography against more targets,” the department’s document about NG911 cyber threats stated.
