AT&T Mobile Users in 14 States Experienced 911 failure

AT&T users in 14 different states and Washington D.C. were unable to call 911 for several hours on Wednesday night. During the 911 outage for AT&T users, city, county, law enforcement, and emergency response officials took to social media to warn users of the outage and their inability to call 911 in an emergency.

The 911 outage lasted nearly five hours and at 10:30 p.m. AT&T had the issue repaired. AT&T’s statement at the time read, “Service has been restored for wireless customers affected by an issue connecting to 911. We apologize to those affected.”

It’s unclear exactly when the issue began or what caused it because AT&T hasn’t stated anything official. The NYT reports that warnings of the outage began at around 5:49 p.m. as noted by warnings issued by the Monongalia County Homeland Security emergency management Agency in West Virginia via Facebook. The warnings continued to be issued until at least 10:25 p.m.

During the outage any 911 calls that were placed by AT&T users failed to connect to 911 operators. During the outage, the Hendricks County Communications Center in Indiana stated that, “We have conducted test calls locally and it will just ring.”

FCC chairman Ajit Pai has stated that the agency received reports of the outage and that it was investigating. Officials in at least 14 states posted warnings of the issue, the states included Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia.