In a late-night development on Wednesday, the 911 emergency call line was reinstated in several parts of the United States, following a broad outage that affected South Dakota entirely and parts of Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas. The cause of the failure, however, remains unidentified.
Officials from South Dakota, Nevada, and Las Vegas confirmed the restoration of the 911 services. The outage was reported by the Department of Public Safety in South Dakota, police in Las Vegas, the Nebraska county of Douglas, and the Texas city of Del Rio on Wednesday evening.
The Del Rio police department attributed the outage to a problem with a major cellular carrier, distancing the issue from civic systems. Later, the Las Vegas police announced that their 911 service had been restored, ensuring that everyone who called during the outage had been called back and provided assistance. Nevada police also confirmed that services were back up in the southern part of the state.
The Department of Homeland Security has previously warned about the heightened risk of cyberattacks on 911 services as they transition to digital systems based on Internet Protocol standards. In recent years, several cyberattacks targeting 911 systems have disrupted the services, including a significant one in 2017 that paralyzed 911 centers in more than a dozen states.
During the outage, authorities had urged people not to call 911 as a test. The national 911 program, housed in the transportation department's office of emergency medical services, did not immediately return requests for comment. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency also did not respond to requests for comment.
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