DC 911 Service Down More Than 1 Hour Over Weekend, Officials Say
The District of Columbia lost 911 service for 100 minutes over the weekend due to an equipment failure, D.C. officials said at a Sunday news conference. The 911 service went down at the district's primary 911 facility at 11:35 p.m.…
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Saturday and wasn't restored through a backup facility until 1:15 a.m. Sunday, said Chris Geldhart, director of D.C.'s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. During the outage, the district posted 10-digit numbers for making emergency calls, which started coming in at 12:25 a.m., he said. They totaled 30 emergency service calls, five police calls and five fire calls, officials said. Geldhart said officials are confident they know what happened -- boxes that route electric power to 911 systems inside the primary facility stopped working -- but are still investigating why it happened. Officials ruled out computer hacking or malicious attack as the cause, he said. Karima Holmes, director of the D.C. Office of Unified Communications, said the outage wasn't related to a recent 911 outage affecting Sprint systems in Montgomery County, Maryland, and other Washington-area jurisdictions (see 1608170012). The D.C. 911 service is "fully functional" and both the primary and backup facilities will remain in operation for the time being, she said.