Philip Hayes, B-shift night supervisor for Johnson County 911, works in July 2022 at his station at the Johnson County Emergency Communications Center in Franklin. A Dec. 12 service outage on Tuesday caused Johnson County 911 to use a backup system.
Daily Journal File Photo
Host server disruptions were the cause of a 911 outage that affected several Indiana counties last week, a state official revealed Monday.
911 access was knocked out for several Indiana counties on Dec. 12, including Johnson County. Other counties affected included Hancock, Hamilton, Lawrence, Madison and Shelby. The Indianapolis International Airport also lost primary 911 services.
The Indiana State Treasurer’s office announced Monday morning that the outage was caused by disruption to servers hosted by AT&T. The office oversees the Indiana Statewide 911 board, which has jurisdiction over 911 services statewide.
Indiana State Treasurer Daniel Elliot is now “demanding an open accounting” from AT&T on behalf of all Hoosiers affected by the outage. There has been a lack of answers from AT&T on addressing the root cause of the outage, according to a news release from his office.
“This is not the first time we’ve had problems with AT&T’s host servers,” Elliot said in the news release. “We need a prompt response on what caused the AT&T outage, and we need a resolution to prevent AT&T outages like this in the future.”
“The State of Indiana should not be kept in the dark,” he added.
All Indiana public safety answering points, or PSAPs, operate on AT&T host servers. When the outage occurred, the dispatch centers moved the 911 calls to backup phone systems to continue emergency calls. Backup systems came online within 1-2 minutes, according to the news release.
AT&T is currently investigating the cause of the outage, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Daily Journal Monday afternoon.
“We worked quickly to restore 9-1-1 service and calls are routing normally at this time,” the spokesperson said.
First reports of outages came in before 6 p.m. on Dec. 12, with Johnson County 911 confirming in a Facebook post later that evening that they were affected as well. Although Johnson County was affected by the service outage, 911 dispatchers were operating on backup systems and were still able to take 911 calls and messages. Non-emergency calls were also still able to be taken.
Normal service was restored statewide by 8 p.m. Tuesday, and the outage demonstrated the “resiliency” of Indiana’s 911 systems, Elliot said in a news release last week. The 911 board said backup and text to 911 systems “worked as intended.”
