Emergency call systems in at least three states were hit by the widespread CrowdStrike technology outage, although most major U.S. cities avoided problems overnight.
In Oregon, some 911 centers, hospitals, airports, and public safety and emergency management agencies had major effects, said Erin Zysett, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Emergency Management.
“Our I.T. teams are working very fast to apply the fixes that CrowdStrike has provided, and those impacts are being mitigated quickly,” she said, adding that statewide alert systems and public safety incident tracking systems were mostly unaffected.
Emergency dispatchers in Portland, Ore., were forced to work without the help of crucial computer systems for several hours and had to work “manually,” Mila Mimica, a city spokeswoman, said in a statement. As of 6 a.m., however, the computer systems were back to working normally.
In Phoenix, the outage affected a computerized 911 dispatch center, Police Department officials said, but the city’s 911 centers were still operating. Dispatchers were still able to field calls, but they had to record communications on paper. The 911 call center was restored by about 6 a.m., the Phoenix police said.
In Alaska, problems began to emerge on Thursday night. Call centers across the state for many 911 emergency lines stopped working correctly because of “a nationwide technology-related outage,” the Alaska State Troopers said on social media.
Some dispatch centers lost use of their digital call systems and had to switch to analog phones or rely on other dispatch centers that were still functioning, said Austin McDaniel, the communications director for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. The problems were fully resolved around 4 a.m. local time, he added.
Emergency service outages have already affected services this year. In April, residents had problems calling 911 in parts of Nebraska and Texas, the entire state of South Dakota and Las Vegas. Last month, emergency agencies in Massachusetts scrambled to communicate with the public and directed them to alternative numbers after a firewall unintentionally prevented calls from getting through.
The outage on Friday led to a very busy 16 minutes for the San Francisco Fire Department. Between 2:34 a.m. and 2:50 a.m, 20 fire alarms in buildings around the city blared, prompting firefighters to respond to each one. The alarms were all false and apparently caused by the CrowdStrike outage, said Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a department spokesman.
Agencies in most large cities, however, said on Friday that their emergency communications systems were running as usual. In New York, the 911 system was functioning and emergency response was unaffected, a New York Police Department spokesman said.
The authorities in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Miami also reported that their 911 systems were unaffected.
