D.C.’s latest 911 outage Friday afternoon was just 20 minutes long, but it was the center’s second outage in as many weeks.
According to D.C.’s city administrator, the outage was due to a “connectivity disruption” during which public safety agencies in the nation’s capital “transitioned to manual dispatch.”
According to insiders in D.C.’s public safety departments, that means call takers and dispatchers using a pen and pad, sometimes walking slips of paper from one place to another inside the dispatch center. They use radio communications to make sure fire crews knew where to go.
A spokesperson told the News4 I-Team connectivity disruptions “were related to the performance of hardware which hosts the Computer Assisted Dispatch software; and the District is working to implement the necessary monitoring and possible system upgrades.”
The statement did not say if that work is complete or if a fix had been made.
In the same set of answers, the spokesperson for D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety confirmed D.C.’s 911 system has had seven outages this year. One was planned for a system upgrade, two are related to software update glitches — the CrowdStrike outage on July 19 and the one caused by an “improper” software update in D.C. on Aug. 2.
The Aug. 2 outage is the one during which a Northwest D.C. family says they tried to call 911 for help with their unresponsive 5-month-old, who did not recover and was declared dead.
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In a confusing answer Monday, the spokesperson suggested the four other outages are due to those connectivity disruptions — including the outage 10 days ago when it was out for more than two hours.
Monday, Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who leads the Public Safety Committee, told News4, "In emergency response, our standard of expectation must be 100% expediency and accuracy. I am troubled by what seem to be repeated errors.”
D.C. Director of the Office of Unified Communications Heather McGaffin — the person in charge of the 911 system — has not responded to any questions related to the center in months. She has said in previous testimony that improving staffing will help improve performance.
According to their own record keeping, in July 2023, 33% of all 911 shifts didn’t have enough people working to meet minimum staffing levels. In July 2024, that jumped to 88% of all shifts.
