Crime & Safety
AT&T 911 Outage Wednesday Affected Tri-Valley Residents
AT&T customers were asked to use police department phone numbers rather than trying to dial 911 during an emergency Wednesday night.
ALAMEDA COUNTY, CA — Police departments in Tri-Valley sent urgent messages to their residents to notify them of a serious cellular phone service outage that could prevent them from calling 911 during an emergency Wednesday night. Just before 7 p.m., Pleasanton and San Ramon police departments sent out alerts to their citizens about the widespread and critical outage affecting those with cellular service through AT&T.
Police officials asked affected residents to dial the department phone numbers directly instead of trying to use 911 during the outage. AT&T confirmed the outage via Twitter and the outage was resolved about an hour after police notified residents. AT&T issued an apology via social media.
Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said via Twitter that the FCC will be investigating the incident that sent police departments scrambling and affected customers across the nation.
Find out what's happening in Pleasantonfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Thank you for letting us know @ATT! Your rapid response is much appreciated! https://t.co/K10ex2KP7h
— San Ramon Police (@sanramonpolice) March 9, 2017
Service has been restored. Please returned to using 911 for all emergency calls. @PleasantonCA https://t.co/Stq26NFZUj
— Pleasanton PD (@pleasantonpd) March 9, 2017
Issue has been resolved that affected some calls to 911 from wireless customers. We apologize to those who were affected.
— AT&T (@ATT) March 9, 2017
.@FCC AT&T has reported to me that 911 service is now restored. The @FCC will investigate the root cause of the outage and its impact.
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) March 9, 2017
Photo via Shutterstock
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