911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink datacenter.
The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage, but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”
In a tweet, CenturyLink added that it was “working tirelessly” until it gets its affected systems back up and running.
CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Datacenter or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.
In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.
Some residents of affected areas were sent emergency warnings to their cell phones, warning of the outage.
Who is #CRESA and what does this mean? How is 911 down. I don’t need to call but this is alarming pic.twitter.com/MB7f6iZTnn
— its_lady_kc (@its_lady_kc) December 28, 2018
Among the areas affected include Seattle, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several other states, including Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Missouri, are also affected, local news has reported.
Police in Boston, Massachusetts tweeted that their service was restored this morning.
UPDATE: Technical issues with the 911 system, and the resulting wireless capability outages, have been resolved. Massachusetts callers may resume using 911 from their cell phones for public safety emergencies. https://t.co/6AAeRdVxeN
— Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) December 28, 2018
We’ll have more when it comes in.
