System update might have triggered 911 outage

An investigation has started into why the 911 system failed across Washington.

State officials said the failure was with Comtech, the vendor that provides the backbone for the state’s 911 services.

The company told KIRO 7 it is still investigating the cause, but a system update might have inadvertently triggered the outage.

Thursday’s failure began at 3:39 p.m., with calls restored at 4:33 p.m.

State emergency management officials said while they haven’t yet heard of any critical situations where people couldn’t get help, they are not pleased about the outage.

“This is not acceptable and it does not serve our citizens, so absolutely we take it seriously,” said Karina Shagren of the Emergency Management Division.

“We are putting pressure on them to get us answers as quickly as possible. We also want the answers to be right,” Shagren said.

She said the company had ten days to report on the cause.

This was Comtech’s first 911 failure in Washington.

The previous vendors, CenturyLink and Intrado, paid state and federal fines for a six-hour, multi-state outage in 2014.

During that outage, Alicia Cappola tried 37 times to call 911 when a man broke into her house.

“I mean, it’s terrifying. It’s so scary to need 911 and it’s busy,” she told KIRO 7 at the time.

Another CenturyLink 911 outage happened in 2018.

After this newest outage, Comtech officials said they are not yet sure how many people tried to call 911 and couldn’t get through.

But the company said the problem is fixed and should not happen again.

During Thursday’s outage, local ten-digit emergency numbers still worked, and state officials suggest looking up the number where you live and keeping it handy.

Also, 20 of the state’s 39 counties now have text-to-911 service, including King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties.

That service also worked during the outage.

Cox Media Group