Vermont’s 911 system went out for more than half an hour Wednesday afternoon, affecting 44 callers.
Vermont’s Enhanced 911 Board announced in a news release Wednesday evening that the system was down from 4:07 p.m. to 4:49 p.m. The board said it found out about the issue at 4:25 p.m.
The board said it reached out to many of the people who could not get through to 911 call-takers and confirmed most of the callers either reached local responders or did not have an emergency.
The board said it would spend Thursday following up with anyone it couldn’t reach. “Any situation that prevents the public from reaching a 911 call-taker is a very serious event,” it said.
FairPoint Communications built Vermont’s new 911 system in 2015, and it went live July 31. The company replaced Intrado and has a five-year contract with the state worth $11.2 million.
The board said it directed FairPoint to “conduct a thorough investigation of (the) outage and expects a full report in the coming days outlining the cause of the outage and steps that have been taken to prevent any future event of this nature.”
FairPoint said the outage had to do with the 911 system’s software, not FairPoint’s phone lines. In November 2014, the company’s phone system known as SS7 went down for three hours and consequently knocked down Intrado’s 911 system.
