FCC Investigating Nationwide 911 Outage for AT&T Users

FCC Investigating Nationwide 911 Outage for AT&T Users

  • Mar 09, 2017

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating a brief, but apparent nationwide outage of 911 emergency services for customers of AT&T, its chairman said Wednesday night.

A spokesperson for AT&T confirmed the news to NBC News last night, saying the outage was due to a “service issue” that affected “some calls to 911 for wireless customers.” A few minutes later, the company tweeted that the service had been restored for all customers.

The company was vague when it came to just how many customers were without the ability to call 911, but Karima Holmes, director of unified communications for the Washington D.C., government, said her office had been advised there is a nationwide outage for AT&T.

Emergency and city communication officials from across the country were giving out alternative numbers to call in case of an emergency, showing the widespread outages.

At 10:20 p.m. ET, just before AT&T gave the all-clear for users to begin using the network to call 911 again, DownDetector, a site that monitors internet traffic for real-time information on wireless and broadband carriers, indicated that outage reports for AT&T were clustered mostly around New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.


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