911 goes MIA across multiple US states, cause unclear Widespread 911 outages in the United States appear to have mostly been resolved, though that doesn't mean the cause is clear. Reports began coming in last night that 911 services were down across the states of Nebraska and South Dakota, with parts of Texas and Nevada – including the city of Las Vegas – experiencing downtime as …
Emergency telephone calls count in the UK as critical national infrastructure, and are usually (at least int he UK) well protected (at least physically for the blue light handling exchanges). Also in the UK coast guard and mountain rescue calls are via 999 or 112. There will be some explaining to be done, and for such large geographical area covers by the outages, I expect quite a lot of calls will have been made without result. I hope nobody died as a result.
911 is not a global emergency call number, but is fairly common, as are 999 (probably a relic of the British Empire) and 112. For more info see:
From good ol' Wikipedia:
"911, sometimes written 9-1-1, is an emergency telephone number for Argentina, Canada, Dominican Republic, Jordan, Mexico, Palau, Panama, the Philippines, Sint Maarten, the United States,[2] and Uruguay, as well as the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), one of eight N11 codes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/911_(emergency_telephone_number)#:~:text=911%2C%20sometimes%20written%209%2D1,one%20of%20eight%20N11%20codes.
And the US State Department had a handy reference table for national emergency call numbers in other states at: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/students-abroad/pdfs/911_ABROAD.pdf .
Worryingly, the entry for Tibet is "Unknown".
"With pulse dialing "111" is effectively just three hookswitch taps with a slight pause between each one."
Depends on how your network is set up - in New Zealand we used reverse dials, so "111" was three trains of nine pulses - "999" as an emergency number could be dialed by wires in the wind.
I'm not sure which, if any, other countries used a reverse dial system.
Busy Signal: Behind CenturyLink’s 911 Service Outage of 2014
“On the early morning of April 9 2014, more than 6000 calls to 911 failed to reach call centers during a system outage .. software used a counter with a fixed limit to assign incoming calls a tracking number, and on that morning the counter reached its maximum value of just 40 million, and thereafter began to drop calls”
This post has been deleted by its author
Might be BCD-related, if someone used 8 BCD digits — 4 bytes — and decided to use the higher values of the most-significant bytes for special purposes. BCD would definitely be a possibility if COBOL or a mainframe DBMS were involved. Still seems kind of arbitrary, though.
One local agency (BART) reports that they have five or six attempted or successful copper thefts per day. It wouldn't surprise me if the undereducated thieves accidentally cut a fiber line quite regularly, but we only hear about it when it affects something like an airport without redundancy.
I can't find it now, but there was an incident several years back where a fire in a fiber optic cable conduit caused a big outage. The fire department didn't put out the fire...because the company had posted a "HIGH VOLTAGE" sign to deter copper thieves.
But what about the real emergency number?
On a more serious note, I find it kind of worrying that apparently someone installing a single new light pole (and apparently damaging one or more lines at that location) could take out emergency services in 3 states. That's the sort of cascade failure that's supposed to be prevented by having dynamic routing and backup/parallel paths.
This is pretty likely.
Redundant fiber also isn't a guarantee because these things tend to funnel into a few narrow areas where right of way is easy to get. I vaguely recall hearing about one outage where both redundant lines were cut because they were buried along the same set of train tracks.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
