By Claire Z. Cardona
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS —AT&T wireless customers trying to dial 911 across North Texas got busy signals Wednesday, in what some were calling a statewide and even nationwide problem.
Several police departments, including Dallas, Fort Worth, Mansfield and Highland Park, posted alternative phone numbers to call in the event of an emergency.
“We are aware of a service issue affecting some calls to 911 for wireless customers and we’re working to resolve it as quickly as possible,” an AT&T spokesman said in a statement. “We apologize for this inconvenience.”
About 9:30 p.m. AT&T said service had been restored for those affected, but did not give any information about what caused the service issue.
Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on Twitter that the FCC will investigate what caused the outage and its impact.
Officials from Central Texas to the Brazos Valley were also posting alternative phone numbers for emergency services in response to the outage.
AT&T has not said how widespread the issue may be, however, the Dallas Police Department said in a statement that the issue is occurring in other states as well.
The North Texas Emergency Communications Center, which serves Addison, Carrollton, Coppell and Farmers Branch, said it was advised by AT&T of a national 911 outage, a city of Addison spokesman said in a statement.
Residents in those cities were still able to text 911 during the outage.
Officials from Central Texas to the Brazos Valley were also posting alternative phone numbers for emergency services in response to the outage.
Some officials are encouraging people to put the non-911 number for their local emergency services into their cell phones in case this happens again, KXAS-TV (NBC5) reported.
Emergency systems were down Monday for some counties in South Texas as the result of a communications fiber optic line that had been cut, KRGV-TV reported.
It’s unclear whether the issue that affected North Texas had a similar cause.
In Dallas, a ghost call issue has forced hundreds of 911 callers to wait on hold for extended periods of time creating a life-threatening problem that city officials have called “unacceptable.”
When someone makes a legitimate 911 call, their phones will dial multiple times and the calls register as hang-ups. That forces operators to call back every number to verify whether emergency assistance is needed.
T-Mobile is the only carrier experiencing the ghost calls, the city of Dallas said.
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