OLYMPIA (AP) — The Washington Emergency Management Division believes the 911 system is stable now, but it still wants assurances from CenturyLink there won’t be a repeat of last week’s statewide outage, Division Director Robert Ezelle said.
The telephone company shared information Monday as it investigates what went wrong, he said.
“We’re encouraged by the information they provided,” Ezell said Tuesday. “We’re trying to pin down what the root causes were and why backups didn’t pick up when a component failed.”
CenturyLink says about 4,500 calls failed to get through during a six-hour outage Thursday that was caused by a technical error in a third-party vendor’s call router. About 770 calls were completed in that period. CenturyLink says it has addressed the issue.
The outage involved 127 dispatch points in Washington.
The company said a similar two-hour 911 outage in parts of Northwest Oregon was caused by a separate problem.
One woman who futilely called 911 early Thursday remained in a Tacoma hospital Tuesday after repeatedly passing out, possibly because of a heart condition.
