A large-scale outage on Wednesday affected residents’ ability to call the 911 emergency number in parts of Nebraska and Texas, the entire state of South Dakota and Las Vegas, according to local authorities.
In Las Vegas, calls to 911 on landline phones and mobile phones were not connecting for about two hours before service was restored at about 9 p.m., the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said on social media.
During the outage, dispatchers could see attempts to make calls from mobile phones and would call residents back, the police said, and all attempted calls had been answered.
The outage also affected southern Nevada, the Nevada State Police said.
Outages were also reported by the local police departments of Dundy, Kearney, and Howard in Nebraska. All three said between 12 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. on Facebook that service had been restored.
The police department of Del Rio, Texas, said that customers of one cellular provider were having issues calling 911. A spokeswoman said that the issue was only affecting T-mobile customers, and that service had not yet been restored to those customers at 1:15 a.m.
The South Dakota Department of Public Safety said on social media that the outage was affecting residents throughout the entire state. In most parts of the state, residents could still text 911, and call their local police and county sheriff offices on their nonemergency phone lines, the department said. At about 11 p.m., the South Dakota Highway Patrol said on social media that service had been restored.
In February, a widespread AT&T outage temporarily cut off connections for users across the United States for many hours, leaving FirstNet, the emergency communications network, out of service. Police forces like the New York Police Department were unable to make calls or send emails.
