AT&T outage causes some local 911 issues
Photo by: Associated Press
The intentional bombing of several buildings in Nashville on Christmas Day, including an AT&T regional connections facility, showed how one man could disrupt communications across multiple states, although in Hancock County it mostly slowed things down and made them more difficult rather than stopping things all together.
After a man blew up his RV, and himself, at around 6:30 on Christmas morning, damaging the AT&T building, cell and internet communications began to fail, which in Hancock County happened around 11:45 a.m.
It caused immediate problems for the county’s 911 dispatch center and its director, Damian Rice.
“I got a notice that the internet went down about 11:45 a.m. on Christmas Day,” said Rice.
He originally thought the internet had just gone out for a minute, or that there was some minor problem, so he called the dispatch center and was told they’d just lost access to NCIC.
Rice called Breckinridge County to route their stuff through them until the problem could be sorted out, but the man on the other end had bad news.
“And he said ‘I can’t do that… because I’m seeing a sea of red. Everybody’s down,’” Rice said.
Rice, who also works in IT, realized that the building’s internet and even the backup internet, which is a hotspot from a cell line, were also unavailable.
“So I ended up going over to Indiana and getting a Verizon myfi to at least get us up enough that we could still locate people,” he said.
The 911 system never went down, he said, so they were still receiving calls the entire time, at least from those who had working phones on their end.
“If they could get out, they could get in, for the most part, as far as we know,” he said. “Now we did notice that there’s still some landline issues as of (Monday). And as of yesterday it was intermittent that from the copper, from the landline, we couldn’t call cell phones back.”
Kentucky State Police dispatchers had issues during the outage too, according to a press release sent out on Christmas Day.
“Kentucky State Police, Post 16 Henderson is experiencing issues regarding calls coming into the dispatch center,” the release said. “We are asking those trying to contact KSP Post 16 to use phone numbers 502-682-8626 or 502-682-2251 until further notice.”
It wasn’t until December 27 that they sent out a release saying their issues were resolved.
Problems lingered at the Hancock County 911 center as of Tuesday, where the system for automatically locating callers was still down, meaning the callers had to quickly say who they were and where they were instead of that information being automated.
“If you call 911 today, they still don’t have all that back up, as far as us being able to automatically locate you,” Rice said Tuesday.
The bombing knocked out AT&T cell and internet service in Tennessee, but the outages extended up to Kentucky and down into Alabama.
The effects went past just not being able to make calls, but some stores had problems with their credit card systems, causing some stores, like Dollar General on state Route 69, to only be able to accept cash.
Service has mostly been restored at least in the county, but Rice said the outage exposed how little it takes to cause widespread problems locally.
“It showed vulnerabilities across the state, as far as redundancy,” he said. “Like Owensboro, they have multiple internet providers, so they can flip everything over there, but we don’t have that benefit here.”
By Dave Taylor
dave.hancockclarion
@gmail.com
