Massachusetts restores 911 service after statewide outage - The Boston Globe (2024)

Local, state, and federal authorities should focus on making sure there are redundancies that prevent the crucial system from going down like this, he said.

“People call 911 on the worst days of their lives,” Chiaramonte said. “We don’t have other options.”

The cause of Tuesday’s outage remains under investigation, according to the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which oversees the 911 infrastructure in Massachusetts. A Federal Communications Commission spokesperson said the agency is “looking into” what happened.

The system was down for about two hours in mid-afternoon, officials said.

The sudden outage caught law enforcement off-guard, forcing them to resort to age-old communications methods to alert residents. Cities told residents to pull red fire alarm boxes. Police, with cruiser lights on, roved neighborhood streets flagging down people to alert them.

Wireless emergency alerts were sent to cellphones across the state.

Cellphones lit up with an alert around 2:30 p.m. reporting 911 services are “currently down Statewide.” A second mobile alert went off around 2:47 p.m. Another round of alerts went out around 4:20 p.m. that said 911 services had been restored statewide and urged people not to place “test calls” to 911.

The outage Tuesday effectively eliminated easy access to emergency services just as the Northeast came under a blistering heat wave. Boston declared a heat emergency from Tuesday to Thursday, when temperatures are predicted to rise into the upper 90s and could hit 100 degrees in some spots.

Massachusetts has 206 local or regional 911 centers, overseen by the State 911 Department. The agency provides support and infrastructure for the centers, which are called public-safety answering points, or PSAPs.

The Holbrook Regional Emergency Communications Center, a PSAP that covers 11 towns in Boston’s suburbs, lost its phone system for about two hours before returning around 3:20 p.m., according to deputy director of communications Lauren Mielke.

“This has never happened in the nearly 20 years” she’s been working in call centers, Mielke said after the system began to come back online.

The outage was limited to the phone system, she said. Computers remained up, and so did a program called RapidSOS that logs the phone numbers of people calling 911. That meant that even though the calls weren’t going through, the staffers were able to see the attempts and call people back on other phones.

Mielke said it was a scramble, and she said she wanted to credit the dispatchers and call-takers, two jobs that suffer from severe burnout and staffing issues even when the systems are all working.

“I would like to point out the hard work and dedication of our staff,” she said. “They have a hard job as it is.”

The outage came to light just as Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Police Commissioner Michael Cox were about to hold a news conference to discuss plans for Friday’s parade to celebrate the Boston Celtics’ 18th NBA Championship.

Cox said it was important for people to know alternate ways to get help, such as by pulling a call box found on many street corners, which can draw fire and EMS services.

In Worcester, Officer Jake Berthel said the business line at the department received 10 calls in the first 30 minutes after the statewide alert was issued. Callers were confused about the alert, and were calling to check in with the department, Berthel said.

“People didn’t understand the alert and thought they had to call the number,” Berthel said.

The outage also raised alarm for local hospitals and senior care facilities.

Hebrew Senior Life, which operates several residences in Greater Boston, sent residents a list of non-emergency phone numbers for police and fire departments and ambulance companies. Residents were encouraged to save them in their cellphones, a spokesperson said.

Hospitals reported no major incidents as a result of the outage.

Tufts Medical Center relied on its internal communications system to reach first responders onsite, a spokesperson said.

“We are very glad to hear that the issue has been resolved and people in need outside the hospital can once again get the medical assistance they require,” said Jeremy Lechan, a media relations manager for the hospital.

Dr. Paul Biddinger, an emergency physician and chief preparedness and continuity officer for Mass General Brigham, said the outage serves as a reminder for people to keep the 10-digit phone numbers for their local police and fire departments in their phones.

“That’s really important, especially in the heat wave right now where we’re worried about a lot of people who can be more vulnerable in extreme heat, such as the elderly, the very young, those with cardiac, with respiratory conditions,” Biddinger said in a phone interview Tuesday. He noted that the hospital group’s community practices and primary care offices also rely on 911 if they have a patient who needs to be rushed to the emergency room.

Seattle-based Comtech Telecommunications has operated the state’s 911 system since 2019. The contract was renewed about one month ago.

“We have a team onsite working closely with the State 911 Department and Massachusetts state and local officials to identify the cause,” the company said in a statement. “This is the highest priority for that team and for our business, and we’re monitoring progress closely.”

The state used an emergency cellphone alert service operated by Burlington-based Everbridge to warn people about the outage.

Tuesday’s outage followed a similar incident April 12 when portions of the 911 system in Massachusetts temporarily went down due to a network issue, leaving about 50 PSAPs without service, according to MassLive.

On April 17, a 911 outage affected all of South Dakota and parts of Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas. And in September 2020, cities in 14 states suffered a 911 shutdown.

These sunny-day outages are happening increasingly often, said Harold Feld, a senior vice president of telecommunications nonprofit Public Knowledge who studies 911 systems. He said the aging telecommunications infrastructure, deregulation on the state level, and increasingly complex arrangements over control of various parts of the emergency telecommunications systems contribute to the issue.

“We need better oversight of phone systems,” he said. “States need to take a very close look here.”

Consider, he said, that it’s not even easy to know when an outage has happened. A call center might notice it’s suddenly been “weirdly quiet,” and then they start checking around to others who say the same.

“We don’t even know when it’s down,” he said. “We don’t even know whose fault it is.”

Hiawatha Bray of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents Ava Berger and Lila Hempel-Edgers contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.

Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter. Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.