A 40-minute blackout of Vermont’s 911 system was caused by technical glitches and blocked 83 callers from reaching the dispatch center. The disruption of service occurred on Wednesday, August 6th from 12:15 pm to 12:55 pm.
The outage was caused by a failure of the primary system and a redundancy loop that was designed to prevent an outage like this. Following the 40-minute outage, there was an additional 18-hour delay in contacting the 83 people who tried calling 911 while the service was down. Intrado was contracted to provide 911 services to Vermont State and delayed providing numbers to Vermont’s Enhanced 911 Board to follow up with callers because of potential legal implications from not having permission to provide customer’s phone numbers from several telecommunications companies. The 911 callers who could not get through to the dispatch service contacted local police stations or ambulance services to request assistance.
