911 Outages Reported In Multiple Cities, Cause Not Yet Clear

Law enforcement agencies from various cities in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Nevada, and Arizona reported failures in their 911 system after 7 pm ET on Monday. Reports came in from Delaware and Ohio as well.

The service had resumed in most of the places by 8.15 pm. However, the authorities were tweeting on their pages that in case of an emergency, people should call local department numbers instead of the emergency lines.

The NYPD’s own systems were running smoothly but it was aware of the outages.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Emergency Communications Board contacted telecommunications company CenturyLink to find the cause of this failure. The department tweeted that the services were back online and it was going to determine how many calls had been missed during the downtime.

At the same time as this system collapse, Microsoft reported a huge outage of its 365 cloud services. It was not clear if the two events were related.

Services such as Outlook.com, Office.com, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams including Teams Live Event were affected. Users had faced issues with logging in and server connection. The company denied any malicious activity.