CTL CenturyLink Inc

By Nour Malas and Sarah Krouse 

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating what its chairman called a "completely unacceptable" nationwide service outage at telecommunications company CenturyLink Inc., which disrupted 911 emergency-response call operations and temporarily shut down banks, courtrooms, and businesses around the country.

The outages began Thursday, affecting service from Massachusetts to Washington state. The outage also suspended cellphone and internet services by other providers, including Verizon Communications Inc., which rely on CenturyLink for network connectivity in some places.

In addition to disrupted 911 calls, the outage cut a wide swath. State District Court in Albuquerque, New Mexico closed after four hours of work on Thursday because systems went offline. The Idaho Central Credit Union said its ATMs stopped working Thursday, but were operational Friday.

Some states said 911 service was restored Friday morning, but others reported continued interruptions.

CenturyLink said it had identified a "network element" and some other technical problems disrupting services, which it was working to restore. The company didn't elaborate on the problems beyond saying they weren't caused by a cyberattack. It also said that while service disruptions on its network continued Friday, 911 calls were going through where CenturyLink is the 911 service provider.

From Edina, Minn., to Bellevue, Wash., cities and police departments sent out messages on social-media warning of the outage and instructing people to use ten-digit numbers for emergency calls instead of 911, or to text-to-911 services where available.

CenturyLink urged customers in a Twitter post to "drive to the nearest fire station or emergency facility" if they couldn't get through by phone.

The breadth of the outage underscored the fragility of the nation's 911 system, as well as the vulnerability of interconnected telecommunications systems. CenturyLink helps some wireless carriers connect parts of their network, for example, linking cell towers to switches to transmit data.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement Friday said the outage is "completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling." Mr. Pai directed the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to start an investigation, which will also look at the effect CenturyLink's outage "appears to have had on other providers' 911 services."

A CenturyLink spokeswoman said, "We take all service interruptions seriously and have had teams working around the clock to restore affected services." She added the company is in contact with the FCC and policy makers and will cooperate fully with any investigation.

Shortly after 10 p.m. Thursday, Christy Williams, director of 911 for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, heard that one of the 41 emergency call centers in the region she oversees had stopped receiving calls.

Eventually the problems extended to all of those centers, which serve 14 counties, spurring social-media posts to the public and work with vendors to bring the system back up. The problem continued until about 5:30 a.m., but went out again two hours later.

"When you've been in an outage situation and you're up and then you go back down, there's a lack of peace of mind," said Ms. Williams. "We're all still in the war room working together with communications and our vendors," she said.

A spokeswoman for 911 trade group the National Emergency Number Association said this outage, as with past ones, "highlights the urgent need to transition America's 9-1-1 centers to more robust and resilient next generation 9-1-1 networks" that can route calls around outages and use backup facilities.

The U.S.'s 911 system receives 240 million calls a year and consists of more than 5,700 different call centers in counties, parishes and towns across the country. Each 911 call center has varying degrees of technology at its disposal, with some heavily reliant on landlines. Others rely on internet-based technology.

Write to Nour Malas at nour.malas@wsj.com and Sarah Krouse at sarah.krouse@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 28, 2018 17:46 ET (22:46 GMT)

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