Emergency services in at least 14 U.S. states reported that their 911 lines were down yesterday. Police departments reported problems with 911 lines in the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.
The affected states said they were unable to access 911 phone and SMS, but did not provide details about how the outage .
Additionally, the Minneapolis Police Department tweeted the following notice: ATTENTION: 911 lines are not working nationwide. This applies to phone calls and messages .
As ZDNet reports, the outage affected all emergency services simultaneously, while 911 services were restored within 30 and 60 minutes in most affected areas.
A clue to the source of the outage comes from Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered , which also reported a similar phone line outage, attributing the incident to a larger outage occurring in Microsoft Office 365 .
Specifically, Microsoft reported a massive outage yesterday, which occurred after a recent infrastructure change that took down services like Office.com, Outlook.com, Teams, Power Platform, and Dynamics365 . The company fixed the issue today. However, Microsoft's outage only affected Office and email -related services .
Other sources have reported that the 911 outage may not be related to the Microsoft Office 365 outage at all and likely originated from a PSAP (Public Safety Answering Service) provider.
PSAPs are telephone systems where 911 (or 112) emergency calls are terminated before they reach actual emergency services call centers. According to reports on Twitter, a PSAP provider named Intrado is likely behind yesterday's 911 outage.
News of the 911 outage came to light on the same day that a major ransomware attack hit several Universal Health Services (UHS) hospitals in the US. Many are linking the two incidents. However, there is currently no evidence to support this theory.
