911 Systems down in many areas of the US

After an apparent outage at a Century Link data center, several 911 centers in major urban areas have reported interruptions in service. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Dallas, and Boston to name a few with smaller outages being reported in Oregon, Idaho, Missouri, Arizona, Colorado and Virginia. Century Link has mostly been silent on the cause of the issue, simply taking to twitter to state:

CenturyLink has been dealing with a network event. We take service interruptions seriously and have teams working to restore affected services. We made progress in restoring services across the network in the last several hours. We are focused on resolving remaining issues.

The FCC is taking action on the incident, announcing an immediate investigation and stating, ““The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.”

Yes, yes it is. Tell us something we don’t know. And tell us how it’ll get fixed, you know, for next time when it gets hacked again.

While the ’cause’ is yet to be determined, it’s not the first time this has happened nor will the real culprit be disclosed. What should be understood is that our systems are not robust, and are not infallible. In fact, taking into account the strange activity in New York City last night, the proximity of the timing and just before New Year’s is a bit…odd.

2019 just might be a heck of a year. Need training? What’s your own communications plan look like?

 

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9 Comments

  1. Recon Prepper December 29, 2018 at 09:40

    This is why its important to have ham radio and other means of communication that aren’t tied into a national grid like the phone, cellular, and power systems. Having your own micro grid that you control and can receive and send messages to others is important in situations like this.

    • NC Scout December 29, 2018 at 09:41

      Couldn’t agree more.

      • James December 29, 2018 at 10:34

        What I found interesting in Astoria fire(aside form Godzilla/Alien thoughts from roof top videos)is for such a intense/long buring fire for most part seemed the rest of grid held up in region excluding Laguaridia shutdown,was a interesting event and heck of a light show.

        • NC Scout December 29, 2018 at 10:39

          Being wholly ignorant of the grid layout of NYC, I can’t comment. But the event is odd, for sure.

          • misfit01 December 30, 2018 at 08:55

            typically, over current protection, current limiting devices, breakers and other such protection devices shut down problems with in 1/5-1/40 of a second. For a prolonged arc like this would mean no preventive maintenance was being done on the sub station equipment per NEC and NFPA. However couple that with only the airport infrastructure being affected? That was a targeted hack.

          • NC Scout December 30, 2018 at 09:13

            I think so too.

  2. Jim December 29, 2018 at 14:22

    FYI, The Century Link outage didn’t just impact 911 services. At a couple of retailers I visited in eastern Idaho, there were signs posted that Credit Card processing services were also down due to Century Link. From what I saw, folks in these parts took the whole thing in stride. Back in the Chicago suburbs where I came from people would have been more worked up about it. Heck, a weather forecast of a few inches of snow used to cause a run on the grocery stores. This may seem obvious, but from what I’ve seen moving from an urban area to a rural one, the more amenities an area has, the more chaos there is when systems break down. Like Ol’ Remus tells us, “Stay away from crowds”.

    • NC Scout December 29, 2018 at 14:54

      Yeah, that was occurring on several ATM systems including some local.

  3. Anonymous December 30, 2018 at 00:33

    5

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