What to Know
- City and county law enforcement agencies nationwide reported outages of their 911 systems just after 7 p.m. ET Monday
- At the same time, Microsoft reported a massive outage of its 365 cloud services; it was not immediately clear if the two were linked
- Many of the affected departments began to restore emergency phone services within an hour or so
Law enforcement agencies across the country reported brief outages of their 911 systems Monday night, and it was not immediately clear if there was a connection with a major Microsoft system outage.
Law enforcement agencies around the country, from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning sometime after 7 p.m. ET. Multiple reports indicated outages throughout Delaware and Ohio as well.
By 8:15 p.m., many of those departments reported that their services had come back online. Others were still recommending that people call local department numbers instead of the emergency line.
The NYPD said it was aware of the outages, and the possible link to the Microsoft situation, but said its own 911 systems were up and running.
On a status page for its cloud services, the software giant acknowledged a widespread systems issue and said "Any user may experience access problems for Microsoft 365 services." (The city government of Microsoft's own hometown of Redmond, Washington said municipal phones were down due to the company's outage.)
Read some of the earlier tweets from law enforcement agencies below:
