Cause of 911 Outage Has Not Been Determined

The statewide 911 system was temporarily down on Friday evening and state police said on Monday afternoon that AT&T has resolved the issue, but it's not clear what caused the outage.

State police said the 911 system appeared to run fine for a few minutes before it shuts down.

Anyone with an emergency was urged to dial 911 first, but if they do not immediately reach a dispatcher they should hang up and call the local department's routine line, state police said. A list of some of those numbers is available at the bottom of this story.

State police said it appeared the system went down completely for about 10 minutes at about 6:25 p.m. and some towns saw intermittent issues through the evening.

According to the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection website, some departments across the state have a program called Next Generation 911, a new system that is in the process of being implemented across the state. The system is better at pinpointing calls and will eventually be able to accept text messages, unlike older systems.

Wolcott was one of the police departments that experienced issues.

“It was 22 minutes after 6, my dispatcher noticed that the 911 was down,” Wolcott police Chief Edward Stephens said. He explained that a technician was called to transfer any emergency calls from Wolcott to Waterbury, which uses a different 911 system.

Some affected towns sent out automated calls to warn residents of the issues. In New Britain, police made themselves as visible as possible to residents, in case they needed to be flagged down.

“We deployed all our officers out within their districts, no breaks everyone staying proactive,” New Britain police Chief James Wardwell said over the phone.

Meriden and Middletown set up special phone numbers for residents to call while the issues persisted. Meriden also stationed officers and ambulances at the firehouse in the event of an emergency. Meriden dispatchers said they had no reported emergencies that required a response during the outage, and systems went back up around midnight.

Towns and alternate phone numbers (this is NOT a full list):

East Haven

(203) 468-3820

Enfield

(860) 763-8911

Fairfield

(203) 254-4800

Guilford

Police: (203) 453-8061

Fire/EMS: (203) 453-8407 or (203) 453-8408

Haddam

(860) 399-7921

Madison

(203) 245-2721

Meriden

(203) 630-6345

Middletown

(860) 638-4010

Naugatuck

(203) 729-5222

New Britain

(860) 826-3050

Newington

(860) 666-8445

North Haven

(203) 484-2703

State Police Troop A Barracks

(203) 267-2200

State Police Troop B Barracks

(860) 824-2500

State Police Troop C Barracks

(860) 896-3200

State Police Troop D Barracks

(860) 779-4900

State Police Troop E Barracks

(860) 848-6500

State Police Troop F Barracks

(860) 399-2100

State Police Troop G Barracks

(203) 696-2500

State Police Troop H Barracks

(860) 534-1000

State Police Troop I Barracks

(203) 393-4200

West Haven

(203) 937-3900

Willimantic

(860) 465-3135

Wolcott

(203) 879-1414

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