Nationwide outage takes out 911 services, but not for Grant County

by Emry Dinman Staff Writer
| December 31, 2018 1:10 PM

GRANT COUNTY — While surrounding counties and states across the country experienced a massive disruption to 911 services following a nationwide outage of CenturyLink cell services, one of the largest disruptions to Grant County dispatch services came from area residents calling 911 to test if the system worked.

That’s because Grant County was one of the few areas where 911 services continued to work — and began to be flooded with concerned residents testing the system, according to a spokesperson for the Multi Agency Communications Center, which operates dispatch services in the county.

Many reached out to local dispatchers after reading a national emergency alert notification stating that all 911 services in the state were experiencing disruptions, unaware that their county’s services were still functional.

Grant County’s system was not without its own issues during the multi-stage, day-long outage. Dispatchers first noticed issues around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when long-distance calls and toll-free numbers stopped working on landlines. This interfered with the agency’s ability to transfer calls to the Washington State Patrol.

Dispatchers responded to the situation by finding workarounds, including using dispatchers’ cell phones to contact the regional Washington State Patrol office in Wenatchee, a spokesperson said.

The most severe outage came around 9 p.m. on Thursday, when 911 services in most counties ceased to work — but not in Grant County. While officials with Grant County’s MACC dispatch are still uncertain what may have spared the area from the outage, it may be because MACC has not yet finished transferring to a newer system as other counties across the state have done, a spokesperson said.

In a statement, CenturyLink described the outage as a “network event” and said it was working around the clock to handle the service interruption, but did not elaborate on what caused the issue. The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it was taking the unusual step of opening an investigation into the cause and scope of the outage.