— from Jan Kampbell —
On April 10, CenturyLink experienced a 911 outage in Washington. The outage was not caused by any failures or malfunctions of CenturyLink’s network and was not related to any OpenSSL issues such as Heartbleed. The outage was due to a technical error in a third-party vendor’s call router, which prevented the system from properly processing calls. CenturyLink and its vendor partner have taken steps to implement an enhanced monitoring process and have addressed the router issue. Our 911 system has been returned to normal operations and we are confident these steps have addressed this issue.
Approximately 770 911 calls were completed and 4,500 failed between 12:36 a.m. PST and 6:26 a.m., when 911 service was fully restored. This occurred across 127 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in Washington; other PSAPs successfully rerouted calls.
“CenturyLink’s top priority is customer safety and reliable communications,” Brian Stading, Northwest Region President said. “We are working closely with our vendor partner to fully to understand this outage. At this time, we are confident that the 911 system is fully operational and stable.”
