On Monday night, police departments across several cities reported a disruption in their 911 emergency all services. At the time of the outages, the exact extent was not know.
911 lines nationwide were reported as "not operational" by the Minneapolis Police Department, with scant other information provided. There were also reports of problems in departments based in the states of Arizona and Delaware.
In a post made to the department's Twitter page, the Minneapolis Police stated: “ATTENTION: The 911 lines are not operational nationwide. This for phone calls and text messaging. If you need police, fire, or emergency assistance in Minneapolis, please call 612-348-2345. We will advise when this issue is fixed."
Prescott Valley Pd also took to its Twitter page, posting: “POLICE ALERT: 911 line is down statewide. For emergencies, please call Prescott Valley Police Department at 928-772-9267 until further notice."
Several other emergency services across the nation posted to their social media sites, instructing citizens on how to contact the services they would need until the outage was resolved. The exact cause was still unclear on Monday evening. However, there were also reports by the departments of outages that were ongoing that were affecting those Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook and Office.
Earlier in the evening on Monday, Redmond Washington, where Microsoft's headquarters is headquartered, experienced outages of both city phone lines and email accounts, in conjunction with the Microsoft 365 outage.
On Tuesday, Microsoft worked to downplay any possibility the outage, which knocked several services of the tech giant offline Monday, contributed in any manner to the 911 interruptions across the nation even though both events coincided with one another.
A spokesperson for Microsoft, speaking with Fox News on Tuesday, offered: “We’ve seen no indication that the multi-state 911 outage was a result of yesterday’s Azure service interruption.”
The outages of 911 drew instant scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is the agency charged with the regulation of communication services. Jessica Rosenworcel, current FCC Commission, made a call for the incident to be thoroughly investigated.
Rosenworcel took to Twitter, saying: “The one system we need to work all the time is 911. The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this now and figure out what is going on.”
Although some locations resolve the disruption in moments, other departments reportedly experience longer delays.
Was the outage in fact in some way connected to Microsoft?