Police departments across US report ‘nationwide’ 911 OUTAGE, possibly caused by Microsoft cloud glitch
A number of police departments around the United States have reported that their 911 services are down, a widespread outage believed to be linked to a glitch in Microsoft cloud computing platform Azure.
Police and sheriffs departments in at least Minnesota, Arizona, California, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania noted issues with their emergency call systems on Monday, directing residents to use alternative numbers while they work to correct the issue, allegedly caused by a technical failure in Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services.
No official explanation has yet been offered for the outages in any of the affected locations.
ATTENTION: The 911 lines are not operational nationwide. This is for phone calls and text messaging. If you need police, fire or emergency medical assistance in Minneapolis, please call 612-348-2345. We will advise when this issue is fixed.
— Minneapolis Police (@MinneapolisPD) September 28, 2020
Public safety alerts were sent by text to some Minnesota residents, also giving another way to contact authorities if calls to 911 fail to go through.
BREAKING: nationwide 911 outage Can confirm in my area of Minnesota ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/bgJE71xHmK
— Kyle Hooten (@KyleHooten2) September 29, 2020
Microsoft earlier on Monday reported that a “subset of customers in the Azure Public and Azure Government clouds may encounter errors,” while the company’s Office 365 and Outlook services also encountered issues.
911 services are down in the City of Tucson. If you need to make an emergency call, dial 520-372-8011. We will let you know when 911 is back online. pic.twitter.com/aDfAIX3yDU
— Tucson Police Dept (@Tucson_Police) September 28, 2020
Some linked Microsoft glitches to the 911 outages, as many police departments across the US rely on the Microsoft tech to manage their emergency call systems.
Consensus is the nationwide 911 #Outage may be related to the #Azure AD/Auth outage today -- man, if you go #CloudComputing on a critical service like that: you go infrastructure-agnostic across multi-cloud providers, or MS needs to give Azure Government to all 911 integrators.
— Julian West (@julian_west) September 29, 2020
By around 8pm local time in Minnesota, some departments noted 911 service had been restored, however the outages appeared to continue across various counties in Nevada and elsewhere.
All 911 systems are down in Washoe County/ Reno / Sparks. Rerouting is unconfirmed at this time. If you need emergency assistance call (775) 785-9276 for unincorporated Washoe County response
— Washoe Sheriff (@WashoeSheriff) September 28, 2020
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