The most recent 911 outage in DC on Friday afternoon lasted only 20 minutes, but it was the second outage at the 911 center in just a few weeks.
According to the DC City Council, the outage was due to a “connection interruption” during which public safety authorities in the nation’s capital “switched to manual dispatch control.”
According to insiders in Washington DC’s public safety departments, that means callers and dispatchers work with pen and pad, sometimes carrying pieces of paper from one location to another within the dispatch center, and communicating by radio to make sure firefighters know where to go.
A spokesperson told the News4 I-Team that the connectivity issues were “due to the performance of the hardware that hosts the Computer Assisted Dispatch software. The district is working to implement necessary monitoring and possible system updates.”
The statement did not indicate whether the work had been completed or whether a solution had been found.
In the same response, the spokesperson for DC’s deputy mayor for public safety confirmed that there have been seven outages in DC’s 911 system this year. One was planned for a system upgrade, two were related to software update errors – the CrowdStrike outage on July 19 and the one caused by an “improper” software update in DC on August 2.
During the August 2 power outage, a Northwest D.C. family attempted to call 911 to get help for their unresponsive five-month-old baby, who had not regained consciousness and was pronounced dead.
In a confusing response on Monday, the spokesman suggested that the four other outages were due to these connection problems – including the outage 10 days ago when the connection was down for more than two hours.
Council member Brooke Pinto, chair of the Public Safety Committee, told News4 on Monday: “We have to expect 100% speed and accuracy in emergency response. I am concerned about what appears to be repeated errors.”
Heather McGaffin, DC director of the Office of Unified Communications – the person in charge of the 911 system – has not answered questions about the center for months. In previous statements, she said improving staffing would help improve performance.
According to their own records, in July 2023, 33% of all 911 shifts did not have enough people on duty to meet the minimum staffing level. In July 2024, this figure had already risen to 88% of all shifts.
