Emergency service systems tied to 911 went offline across several states on Wednesday night including parts of Nevada, Nebraska, Texas, and the entire state of South Dakota. And the cause has finally been revealed—at least partially. Apparently, the outage had something to do with the installation of a light pole, which severed a fiber line.
Communications services provider Lumen, which handles cloud services for 911 systems, provided Gizmodo with the same statement it gave other news outlets like CNN and ABC News but didn’t elaborate on exactly how the light pole installation caused such an outage across four largely non-contiguous states.
“On April 17, some customers in Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska experienced an outage due to a third-party company installing a light pole—unrelated to our services,” a spokesperson for Lumen told Gizmodo over email Thursday.
“We restored all services in approximately two and a half hours. Our techs identified the issue and worked hard to fix it as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding,” the spokesperson continued.
When Gizmodo asked for more technical details on how the incident disrupted its services, Lumen was not forthcoming. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating the outages, according to NBC News.
The outage in Las Vegas still allowed anyone who needed to contact emergency services to text 911 and anyone who called could still be identified by dispatchers through caller ID, even if the call couldn’t be completed. Dispatchers were calling people back after the initial call, according to the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Disturbingly, the police needed to remind people not to try calling 911 just for fun, given the widespread news coverage.
“Don’t dial 911 to test. Please keep our 911 system available for life-threatening emergencies,” the Las Vegas police wrote on Facebook.
News of the outage Wednesday night immediately got people worried about potential cyberattacks, which have increasingly targeted critical infrastructure over the past decade. While this particular incident appears to be an accident, it’s not unreasonable to assume cyberattacks could be to blame during mass outages. But sometimes, like during AT&T’s recent outage in February, it’s just a mistake.
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