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Numerous cities in multiple counties across North Texas were without 911 service for a period of time on Wednesday afternoon.
Approximately 1.6 million people in 13 counties across the region were affected. All of the affected 911 systems were part of the North Central Texas Council of Governments’ emergency system.
Officials were able to restore the system back to its full capabilities after about three hours.
“We have been operating the system for more than 26 years, and we have never had an outage,” said Christy Williams, NCTCOG Director of 911.
Williams says technicians determined a technical malfunction was to blame. Citing national security concerns, she wouldn't say what that was. However, she said it was not malicious and not terrorism.
‘We are not concerned about the reliability of the system,” she said. “This was a technical glitch that was not able to be identified in advance. But now we will be able to put in systems to make sure that we can in the future.”
It is a future that will have even more safeguards to make sure this lifeline doesn't go down again.
The council of governments says it reached out to the answering centers in its system. It says it didn't get any reports of any sort of incidents that happened with people trying to call 911 and not getting through. They will have extra staff on hand in the near future running additional tests and doing monitoring to make sure it doesn't go down again.