911 down for 14 states … what happened? Who is to blame? How can we solve it?

There was an article that caught my attention dealing with 911. While I’ve called it recently, I had no idea that I did because I didn’t get speech feedback on what it was doing. It was not my intent to call, but I know it is available.

On the 28th of September, something happened where 911 services were down for 14 different states. On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 28, several states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada,
North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington reported 911 outages in various cities and localities.

Multiple news reports suggested the outages might have been related to an ongoing service disruption at Microsoft. But a spokesperson for the software
giant told KrebsOnSecurity, “we’ve seen no indication that the multi-state 911 outage was a result of yesterday’s Azure service disruption.”

Inquiries made with emergency dispatch centers at several of the towns and cities hit by the 911 outage pointed to a different source: Omaha, Neb.-based
Intrado — until last year known as West Safety Communications — a provider of 911 and emergency communications infrastructure, systems and services to
telecommunications companies and public safety agencies throughout the country.

This company, like so many others in various situations similar, did not return requests for comment or answer any questions. While it only was an hour, I would have no idea who to call if I were ever in need of some type of help and couldn’t call 911. Apparently, this is not the first time this company has been known to have problems, according to the article.

The article doesn’t blame Intrado directly, but provided a statement from them in regards to another company who went by another name! The article indicates that that company has had issues in the past, but nobody really knows why.

Were you effected last Monday on this outage? How did you deal with it? Who did you end up calling? Share your experience!