911 Outage Jolts Washington Residents

Last month, millions of western Washington residents were awakened by a wireless emergency alert (WEA) warning of a widespread 911 outage.  The message simply said “widespread 911 outage in WA.  In case of emergency, call local police or fire department.”  The state government was able to successfully blast out the alerts through the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) administered by FERC, functionality that did not exist in the state prior to December 2018!

How the 911 Outage Happened

The root cause of the outage was a CenturyLink service interruption that lasted for approximately 11 hours.  CenturyLink enables 911 calls for all of the state’s 7.4 million residents.  Other impacted states include MA, MN, AZ, UT and MO.  The service interruption impacted both cellphone and landline calls.

Sadly, this is not the first time CenturyLink has experienced a service interruption that impacted 911 calls – in 2014, approximately 6,000 emergency calls failed to properly route during a 6-hour outage, resulting in a penalty of nearly $3 million levied against the company.  Also, as you might expect, CenturyLink is now under FCC investigation.  In addition, Washington State is planning to defect from CenturyLink and move to another provider – Comtech.

For more technical information on what caused the 911 outage, click here. 

Events like this are extremely disappointing from an emergency preparedness perspective.  When an emergency situation rears its ugly head, people can get injured or worse, making access to 911 call centers critical.  This goes for utility crews as well.  There is no upside – interrupted access to emergency help can only hinder restoration efforts. 

Hopefully the FCC investigation will get to the bottom of what happened and hold CenturyLink accountable.  Assuming this happens, it should prompt the development of technological enhancements, system redundancy and backup plans designed to prevent the onset of 911 outages going forward.