Credit: PA Internet News Service
Statewide 9-1-1 emergency call service was fully restored early Saturday morning after experiencing intermittent disruptions on Friday, according to Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA).
Officials announced just after midnight that the system was back up and operational.
The agency stated that it is still investigating the cause of the outage.
The issue was first identified around 2 p.m. Friday by the state’s Next Generation 9-1-1 provider, PEMA Director Randy Padfield said.
The state’s Next Generation 9-1-1 system routes emergency calls from phones to to county dispatch centers. It helps provide call-takers with location and callback data.
During the partial outage, many 9-1-1 calls continued to reach county dispatch centers, Padfield noted. However, some calls were not routed correctly, and others were relayed without the accompanying data.
A recent system update had been completed to the state’s 9-1-1 center, but Padfield said it is not believed to be the cause of the disruptions.
“We have procedures in place to be able to troubleshoot this and determine whether it’s a network issue, whether it’s a software or hardware issue, or whether it lies, sometimes, outside the network,” Padfield told reporters Friday evening.
During the outage, residents in Bucks County were advised to use the 9-1-1 center’s nonemergency number for assistance.
The incident led to a statewide emergency alert sent to cell phones around 3:30 p.m. on Friday.
The Bucks County Emergency Communications Center handled 71,299 calls in June. The majority of calls were for police incidents, with the remainder being emergency medical and fire-related.
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