911 Services Go Down In Westchester, Putnam Counties
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- The 911 services for Putnam and Westchester counties went down for several hours Thursday afternoon.
Westchester County police reported that 911 service for the entire county went down at 3:45 p.m. Yorktown and Mount Vernon were the first to report problems.
While cellphone service was restored within about 20 minutes, spot outages persisted until 6:15 p.m. with landlines.
The 911 lines for Putnam County Emergency Services also went down beginning around 4 p.m. and were restored by about 6:15 p.m., CBS2 confirmed.
A Verizon outage was to blame, according to Westchester County police.
Westchester County police told CBS2's Lou Young that when the 911 system goes down, it is designed to redirect calls to administrative lines. In some places, that did not happen, police said.
Officials late Thursday were trying to figure out precisely what happened and why.