Pennsylvania statewide 911 outage due to faulty operating system, not cyberattack, agency says

The intermittent statewide 911 outage Pennsylvania experienced earlier this month, which lasted for hours and forced residents to call non-emergency numbers to reach dispatchers, was caused by a “defect in the operating system,” not a cyberattack, according to findings from a preliminary report the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency shared Tuesday.

In an update from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration about the incident, the agency claims issues in the systems and components used to process and route calls from phones to 911 centers resulted in disruptions to emergency call delivery.

“As soon as the intermittent outages started, our vendors and partner public safety organizations began to investigate the cause and take steps to resolve the issue,” Jeff Boyle, PEMA’s executive deputy director, said in the press release. “We activated the Emergency Alert System and issued Wireless Emergency Alerts as a precautionary measure to notify everyone in Pennsylvania of the issue and to follow county-based back up plans should they not be able to reach the 911 centers by calling the traditional three-digit phone number.”

At 12:46 p.m. on July 11, PEMA posted about the outage on social media and issued a statewide alert to mobile phones, advising residents to only call with true emergencies.

The press release states that PEMA is still investigating incident and will release additional information when it’s completed its report.