Emergency services were severed for six hours across seven states this spring, leaving more than 11 million people without access to care that could mean life or death. Now a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission said it could have been prevented, The Washington Post reported.
An entirely preventable software problem was found to be to blame for the outage that affected 81 call centers and 6,000 people who tried to reach help. Parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota and Florida were cut off.
A Colorado - based third party company called Intrado was at the heart of the error. It operates a 911 call dispatch center that connects callers to the most appropriate safety answering point, or PSAP. Intrado works by attaching a code to each incoming call as it passes them along as a way of keeping track of the calls.
When the glitch occurred on April 9, the software that assigns the codes stopped counting at a pre - set limit of 40 million calls. This caused the system to stop allowing incoming calls and led to a series of other issues in the 911 database.
"It could have been prevented. But it was not," the FCC's report reads. "The causes of this outage highlight vulnerabilities of networks as they transition from the long-familiar methods of reaching 911 to [Internet Protocol]-supported technologies."
According to the report, the error could have been fixed as soon as it started. Intrado has an operating center in Miami where calls can be re - routed, but since the problem was discovered right away, it went on for six hours and the Miami hub wasn't utilized.
The outage, as well as other problems that have occured with 911, appear to be due to the combination of aging infrastructure ans up-to-date technology. Many systems are supposed to have failsafes, but they don't always, which can lead to a domino affect if one minor problem occurs, The Verge reported.
