“Your call could not be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try again...” These are probably the worst words you could hear when you have to make an emergency phone call to 911, but on early Thursday morning last week, this is exactly what some callers had to endure throughout the state of Washington and some parts of Oregon when regional 911 services experienced an unprecedented outage. Though many of the calls were able to be re-routed to a backup line, an unknown number of calls went unanswered. Even worse is the fact that officials still do not know what caused the outage, making the future prevention of this circumstance difficult at best.

“An outage of this magnitude, and so widespread, is a serious matter,” said Andrew Neiditz, the Executive Director of South Sound 911. South Sound 911 is a regional dispatch center that links several emergency radio networks together from around the local area. “We share the same concerns as our citizens, and we, too, are eager to learn more about what went wrong with the overall system.”

The centers are also linked through the CenturyLink (News - Alert) Network, yet company spokeswoman Kerry Zimmer did not share her thoughts on whether or not the outage could be caused by an equipment problem or computer hacking. Thankfully some centers still had one or two lines operating during the outage, and the time frame happened during a quiet part of the early morning. “I guess overnight was a good time,” said Zimmer concerning the outage, “but no 911 outage is good.”

The outage was detected when Pierce County dispatch centers noticed an unusually low volume of calls starting around midnight. Emergency personnel responded to the situation by sending social media alerts informing the general public to attempt using cell phones, which appeared to have a higher success rate of calling. They were also encouraged to try calling non-emergency numbers, or to go to fire stations in person. Making a VoIP call using e911 services would also have been a viable option, as the calls are routed through the Internet instead of transferred through the downed phone lines.