Authorities reported that 911 emergency calling service has been restored in areas of at least four states where problems were reported since Wednesday afternoonHowever, the cause of the failure has not yet been identified.
The entire state of South Dakota experienced 911 emergency call line outages on Wednesday, as well as parts of Nebraska, Nevada and Texas, leaving millions of people unable to contact authorities.
Officials in South Dakota and Nevada told Reuters early Thursday morning that service has been restored.
Local authorities used social media to inform residents that emergency calls to 911 were not working.
Of the four states that lost 911 coverage from Wednesday night to Thursday morning on some or all parts of their borders, two are still experiencing problems.
In South Dakota, service was restored at 11:59 p.m., according to a tweet from the US Emergency Alert account @ENSAlerts. While in Nevada, the Las Vega Metropolitan Police Department announced that the service is now operational at 12:15 am on Thursday.
Several Texas cities also suffered outages, including Del Rio and Kilgore. The department has not provided any updates since publication.
In Nebraska, most affected cities provided an update early Thursday morning indicating that service had been restored.
While officials have not said precisely what caused the outages, they came on the heels of a warning from the Department of Homeland Security about increased risks of cyberattacks on 911 services as they move to Internet-based systems.
The analysis released by ABC News highlights concerns that the Emergency Services Sector can be exploited and extracted to obtain sensitive datawhich in turn hampers medical and police services and represents an ongoing threat to personal safety. information and public safety.
So far, there is no indication that the overnight 911 outages were caused by a cyberattack or other malicious act, law enforcement officials told NBC News on Thursday.
“We are aware of reports of 911-related outages and are currently investigating,” the Federal Communications Commission wrote in X on Thursday morning.
Keep reading:
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–US Government seeks to get 50 countries to commit to not paying ransomware ransoms