911 service restored in some areas after outages reported in at least four states across US

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: ABC News

April 18, 2024, 12:47 AM


Emergency 911 phone service has been restored in some of the areas hit by outages on Wednesday night.

At least six cities in four different states across the United States reported experiencing 911 call outages earlier in the evening, according to officials.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said service had been restored in the city just before 9:15 p.m. PT. "9-1-1 phone service has been restored," the LVMPD wrote in a post on X. "All of the individuals who called during the outage have been called back and provided assistance. Non-emergency calls are also working. As always, please do not call 9-1-1 unless you have an emergency."

Nevada State Police also confirmed via X that service had been restored for Southern Nevada's Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and Henderson, areas that had reported the outages earlier. The entire statewide emergency calling system in South Dakota experienced an outage, Pierre police confirmed to ABC News Wednesday night. Early Thursday morning local time, though, the Highway Patrol announced it had been restored.

Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/US/911-outages-reported-states-us/story?id=109371506

[Think. Again.]

1. Are the emergency lines in all these various areas...

...connected somehow or have there been multiple problems at the same time?

The article doesn't explain anything about the cause of the outage(s).

[BumRushDaShow]

2. I had to go look it up

and found a stats page showing the status of penetration of the variety of ways 911 can be accessed - https://www.nena.org/page/911Statistics

On that page there is reference to a "PSAP", which is a "Public Safety Answering Point".

The FCC has a registry of those PSAPs - https://www.fcc.gov/general/9-1-1-master-psap-registry

Depending on the locality, the availability and types of 911 access are going to vary widely (obviously urban areas have all the services and rural may have few or none). So I expect a hacker could target weak points at individual (or pooled/regional) PSAPs.

I know I live right near the border between 2 counties, both having 911 services, and interestingly enough, both often responding to a call if an incident happens on a county line street. And in that case, whoever gets there first starts to work the scene, and when the other responding unit arrives, they obviously work out whose county would/should follow-through with the rest of the investigation.