911 callers across the United States found themselves on hold this week as telecom giant CenturyLink experienced a national outage.
According to the company, the outage began early on Thursday and has impacted states from New York to California. It was caused by a “network element” that was impacting services and fully restored service was expected within hours.
However, the company has yet to restore service, and has been providing regular updates on its Twitter page about the status of the outages.
The company first acknowledged the problem on Thursday morning. While service has been restored in some areas since then, not all systems are back up and running.
So far, Missouri, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, parts of Montana, and Massachusetts have seen some sort of impact.
According to CenturyLink, 911 has been unavailable in Arizona, Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri and western Washington. Patient records have been difficult to access for medical centres in north Colorado and for other locations that haven’t been confirmed.
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The outage also shut down Idaho’s Department of Correction and Department of Education. In addition, Idaho lottery ticket sales were temporarily disabled.
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KOMO reports that some customers in Washington experienced busy signals when they attempted to dial 911. NBC reports that one Boston man tried to call 911 with a cellphone to report a house fire on Friday, but was not able to do so due to the outage, according to a Boston fire spokesman.
The Federal Communications Commission announced an investigation into the outage, calling the inability to contact emergency services “completely unacceptable” and is “particularly troubling.”
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“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement.
“The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling. I’ve directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage,” he continued.
Beyond the company’s tweets, CenturyLink has not issued any official statements on the outage. CenturyLink also suggested on Twitter that customers without 911 service should “drive to the nearest fire station or emergency facility” if they require emergency assistance.
According to CenturyLink’s latest Twitter update, the company has restored some services across the network in the past few hours, and is still working to resolve remaining issues.
–With a file from the Associated Press.
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