What If You Called 911 And The System Wouldn't Answer Your Call?

That was the case in Massachusetts for two hours last Tuesday. Faulty firewall blocked 911 calls throughout Massachusetts for two hours | Ars Technica

A 911 vendor's malfunctioning firewall caused a statewide outage in the emergency calling system in Massachusetts on Tuesday afternoon, the state government said. A Massachusetts government press release issued yesterday said the state's 911 vendor, Comtech, "has advised State 911 that they have applied a technical solution to ensure that this does not happen again."

They aren't releasing a lot of technical data, but then the people making public statements don't understand the technical data. The outage lasted from 13:15 to 15:15 local time. (OK, so 1:15 to 3:15 p.m. - happy now?)

They don't say what the "technical solution" was. My guess is they yelled at the tech department for making a change right before they went to lunch, or something similar.

Hat tip to Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony and Daily News Stuff 21 June 2024: Also Also With Edition.

A statewide 911 outage in Massachusetts was caused by a malfunctioning firewall. (Ars Technica)

It took two hours to find the one guy who knew how to fix it, and then thirty seconds to fix.

Which is not exactly true, but probably not too far off from what happened.

Calling 911 is a fine thing to do, as they can send all kinds of help your way. The only problem is that we have come to rely on it always being there, and because it is a system built by people (and funded - or not - by politicians) it won't always work. You should have some kind of Plan B in place, even if that is having the local fire station and police department's regular phone numbers stored in your phone.