Human Error To Blame For Statewide 911 Outage
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – State officials say human error was responsible for the statewide 911 outage earlier this month.
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety released an update Wednesday regarding the Aug. 1 outage, explaining that an employee at a third party provider for CenturyLink, Minnesota's contract service provider, made a mistake while doing network configuration.
That third party vendor was identified as West Safety Services, which is based in Nebraska.
During the outage, which lasted about an hour, 693 calls to more than 50 Minnesota dispatch centers failed to route, according to CenturyLink.
However, some 356 calls were successfully routed through a redundant router.
The outage also affect dispatch centers in North Dakota and North Carolina.
CenturyLink tells officials that West Safety Services has agreed to halt work on the network through the rest of the month.
The company also will look into changing its procedures to ensure that similar error don't occur again.
Meanwhile, the outage remains under investigation by the FCC.