Key takeaways
1. Hundreds of US users reported trouble reaching 911, including dropped calls, busy lines, and no answers.
2. Downdetector reports peaked at 298, with New York among the most affected states.
3. Some users linked the problems to blackout fears, a planned alert test, or a Microsoft outage.
4. Florida’s Clay County Sheriff’s Office said its 911 communications center was not affected.
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Let me guess, budget slashed to nothing, no staff, everything broken after stretched too thin
If you combine this issue with the FAA shutting down air travel and AI executives being scandalized, you have all the tropes you need for a novel about AI takeover.
If AI takes out the rich and leaves us plebs alone, then I say let the AI overlords take over!
^Not really, fuck AI too!^
Terminator: Rise of the Machines I think wrote the script for this…
it didn’t end well for John Connor…
Right, now combine that with Idiocracy and Salo: 100 days of Sodom and you’ve arrived.
It’s not like anybody in the US could afford to use emergency services anyway.
It only costs money if you take the ride.
The call and emergency services showing up is free.
How magnanimous of them.
not necessarily. look up crash tax or rural subscriptions emergency services
We all get it regardless, but we’re just bankrupt afterwards. Even homeless, black, trans, muslim drug addicts will get emergency care. They just get fucked afterwards. ( stereotypes used as satire aganist ignorance )
They’ll do what it takes to keep you alive.
Apparently in the case of my broken heel, that would’ve been foot amputation if my grandma hadn’t loaned me $11k for surgery.
Yep. Frequent blood transfusions are rough too even with insurance. MRIs are still $750 and blood transfusions are still a few thousands of dollars, even with free donated blood.
I can’t find any other news stories which corroborate this story, other than Downdetector. 298 reports on DD is also pretty insignificant compared to what one would expect during such an incident.
Interestingly, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/live-blog/microsoft-outage-outlook-teams-updates-fix-rcna609118 refers to multiple officials stating that their 911 services were not impacted by the MSFT outage.
Reader beware.
This is breaking news.
https://sanbernardino.gov/1748/911-System-is-Down (I’m not sure when this was posted, there’s no date)
https://isitdownrightnow.app/services/911/
Also, imagine if you were in an emergency and couldn’t call 911. Would your first step be to report the error to a site like DownDetector? I bet the reports are a fraction of the reality. However it does seem like its not happening everywhere.
Thanks, CubitOom . Your points are well taken. Between this report, the Microsoft outage, and the US aviation ground-stop, there’s a lot of speculation floating around, so I’m keen to try and substantiate news. No patch on your well intentioned post, though. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires here.
Keep asking important questions.
Honestly, I’m surprised 911 is nationally connected. I thought these were county services that were not interdependent on eachother. So I’m also very confused by this.
There is a national 911 framework, called NG911, but there is no national 911 system.
National Weather Service is also having issues.
That report was false. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-national-weather-service-reports-nationwide-internet-communications-issues-2026-11-13/ (Read the article, it was replaced but the link is unchanged.)
The report that they had “nationwide radar outages” was false, but they did have localized radar and radio issues in some areas
They’ve got so many radar sites, they’re never not having localized issues somewhere. I look at weather.gov for my local forecast and I’ve seen the local radar go offline a bunch of times. It’s not newsworthy.
In addition to that, in the grand scheme of things, relatively few people call 911 on any given day.
I work in a 911 dispatch center, being very generous with my estimates of how many calls we handle on an average day, maybe 0.7% of the county I cover are calling 911. If you didn’t tell them there was an outage, that’s 99.3% of my county would never know.
And again, that’s being very generous. I rounded up a lot of my estimates to make the math easy, so that’s figuring on more dispatchers than we usually have working answering more calls than they normally would, and also counting a bunch of calls that would have actually come in on 10-digit non-emergency lines that probably wouldn’t be effected by a 911 outage anyway. And doesn’t account for the people who call multiple times a day, at times we’ve had some callers who probably make up a significant percentage of the calls we get by themselves. I’m betting the actual statistics is probably less than 0.1% of people call 911 on any given day.
Meanwhile, damn-near anyone with an office job is going to be affected by an issue with outlook, or pretty much anyone with internet access when it’s an issue with Google, AWS, etc. That hits a much broader audience.
FWIW though, it was my day off, and to the best of my knowledge my county didn’t have any issues with 911. We didn’t, however, have access to our email all day yesterday, which was a bit inconvenient.
It’s interesting, I’ve never thought of it. I’m not sure how outages are monitored and if they were I imagine it would be done county by county.
It might be hard to prove how many calls are not received unless routed though a service that keeps track, Even then, what if the service fails or if the call drops before the service is reached?
PS: Thank you for doing what you do, it is very important work and I hope people can continue to rely on 911.
I don’t know all of the technical details, there’s a lot of technical stuff happening in the background with a lot of different companies and agencies involved that’s all well-above my pay grade
But when we have experienced some kind of outage or other issue with 911 calls not going through, often it’s not a total outage, but some issue with a specific carrier or sometimes even specific cell towers, not an issue with all 911 calls in general. So it might be something like only t mobile subscribers can’t get through.
A lot of times, we end up getting notified about a potential issue by the phone companies or by one of the entities involved, I don’t know what sort of monitoring and detection is involved in that but they clearly have some sort of way to figure out what there might be a problem.
Occasionally we get a call from a neighboring jurisdiction because they’re having an issue and want to check if we are also.
It’s also happened, (mostly late at night in the winter, which tends to be the slowest times for my dispatch center) that our supervisor notices that we haven’t gotten any calls in a while and makes a test call from their phone to make sure there’s not an issue. Or if they become aware of a potential issue, they might start asking around “does anyone have Verizon? Can you call 911 to make sure it’s working?” I don’t think we’ve ever uncovered an actual issue that way, but it is something that we’re keeping an eye out for on our own.
I don’t know exactly when/why they do it, I assume it’s part of when they do maintenance on the towers or are trying to track down a potential issue, but we also get pretty frequent test calls from cell company technicians out in the field to make sure things are working. Anecdotally, in my area, it seems like we get more of those from t mobile than other carriers, I don’t know exactly what to make of that, if they’re just more proactive about it than other carriers, if they have more issues that they need to have techs out working on, or if other carriers maybe just do something else to test their equipment. But usually a couple times a week my phone will ring and “it’s t mobile making a test call. Can you confirm…”
And like I said, there’s a lot of different entities involved. I don’t fully understand exactly what they do, but I know there’s a company called intrado that handles a lot of the technology for our phone systems. They’ve notified us about some problems and in some cases even catch some calls that got misrouted and forward them over to us or at least pass along whatever information they have for that caller.
298 reports on DD is also pretty insignificant compared to what one would expect during such an incident.
Compared to a big cloud provider like Microsoft or Amazon, yeah that’s a small amount. But 911 usually receives effectively zero outage reports under normal circumstances. So any spike for 911 is pretty significant.
I don’t know how anyone could actually say this. I live in a less than rural area, and 911 is overloaded or unable to be reached constantly, as my state does a terrible job funding the service. We all ‘think’ 911 and emergency services have 100% uptime until we actually have to use them.
Right, but this is clearly more than just the outlier rural networks failing. This was affecting areas not already prone to 911 issues for a spike in service to have been recognized in the first place.
