It’s still unclear what prevented central dispatch centers across Michigan from receiving 911 calls Tuesday afternoon. So far, the issue is being linked to a statewide fiber network provider.
Close to 95% of county dispatch offices in Michigan are connected to the Emergency Service Internet Protocol Network, a statewide system that helps get emergency calls to the right place.
Jason Torrey is the director of the Grand Traverse County dispatch office. Service there was down for two hours Tuesday. He said Peninsula Fiber Network, who owns and operates the network, has not yet said what specifically caused the outage and the backup systems didn't kick in.
"They deployed technicians, they triage and diagnosed over their network monitoring devices, and they found some transport lines were compromised, to some degree," said Torrey. "This is a bigger, more widespread problem, which brings into question some of the things that we expected the network to do, which is not create these kind of ripple effects statewide."
In an email to WCMU, Peninsula Fiber Network’s General Manager Scott Randall said they are “conducting a technical evaluation of the cause of the network event and will make the report available to Michigan counties that were impacted.”
The outages ranged from as far south as Calhoun County, near the Ohio border, to Delta County in the upper peninsula. The issues were sporadic throughout the state and wasn't a total blackout of 911 services.
WCMU has independently confirmed at least a dozen counties across the state were without 911 services for roughly two hours.
