Safety officials: 911 outage stemmed from problems with third-party vendor

The nearly hourlong 911 outage that prevented some emergency calls and texts from reaching dispatch centers Wednesday afternoon across Minnesota stemmed from problems caused by a third-party vendor working for CenturyLink, according to state public safety officials.

The intermittent outage — which allowed some calls and messages to go through but blocked others — also affected North Dakota and North Carolina.

The vendor, West Safety Services, was performing a "routine process on their network" when the outage occurred, according to a Department of Public Safety spokesperson, Amber Schindeldecker. "West has ceased performing this process until the root cause can be determined."

In addition, CenturyLink and West will attempt to gauge the number of calls that were rejected and not delivered to a 911 call center, she said. Based on typical call volumes, state officials estimate there were likely a few hundred calls made during the outage.

Dana Wahlberg, who oversees the state's emergency communication networks, said the outage lasted roughly 50 minutes. The dispatch centers have not reported any serious incidents so far as a result of the outage.

It's not clear how many or what percentage of calls failed to connect with dispatchers. But Wahlberg said she was not aware of another incident of this magnitude affecting callers in Minnesota.

"I've been in public safety for 30 years and started as a 911 dispatcher," she said. "I have never in my 30 years experienced an outage such as what we experienced yesterday."

Wahlberg said the state will hold its vendors accountable. The state has contracted with CenturyLink for the past seven years. She cited a recent medical emergency in her own family to underscore the need for the system to be reliable.

"My dad called 911 three nights ago for my mother, and we expected it to work, and it did," she said.

Wahlberg's division oversees the state's 102 dispatch centers. Wahlberg said her colleagues in Ohio and Louisiana also experienced similar issues with its 911 systems at the same time on Wednesday, suggesting the problems could have been more widespread than the three confirmed states of Minnesota, North Dakota and North Carolina.

CenturyLink is required to provide a report to the state describing the reason for the outage. The Federal Communications Commission is also investigating the matter, and the lapse could likely result in fines, Wahlberg said.

"CenturyLink is working with the vendor to understand the root cause and preventive measures," said company spokesman Frank Tutalo.