The abrupt failure of Massachusetts' 911 system on Tuesday was a stark example of the disastrous consequences that can occur when an emergency network that is supposed to be reliable is, without warning, suddenly unreliable.
The outage, lasting nearly two hours, prompted a scramble among emergency agencies as they directed the public to reach out directly to the local authorities at less-familiar phone numbers or, as a last resort, go in person to their local firehouse.
Several major failures in recent years have sent officials scrambling, like the T-Mobile outage in June 2020 where 23,000 911 calls went unconnected, resulting in a $19.5 million settlement.
In September of the same year, a 911 provider's preparatory work to update its system caused an outage lasting more than an hour across over a dozen states, illustrating the potential widespread impact of such failures.
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