Massachusetts residents experienced a scary situation on Tuesday when the state’s 911 emergency service went down for about two hours.
From 1:15 p.m. to 3:15 p.m., anyone who tried to call 911 for help couldn’t get through.
This made a lot of people worry about what they would do if they had an emergency during that time.
On Wednesday, officials from Massachusetts explained what caused the outage. They said that a firewall, which is a security system designed to stop cyberattacks and hacking, was actually the reason why 911 stopped working. This was a surprising discovery, since firewalls are supposed to protect systems, not cause them to fail.
The Massachusetts State 911 Department released a statement giving more details. They said that the outage happened because of a safety feature in the firewall that is meant to prevent cyberattacks. However, they are still trying to figure out exactly why this safety feature caused the 911 system to go down.
Even though the outage prevented some emergency calls from going through, the state reassured people that dispatch centers could still see the phone numbers of people who called during that time. This allowed emergency responders to call those people back. The Department said that as far as they know, no emergencies were made worse because of the outage.
Frank Pozniak, who is in charge of the State 911 Department, emphasized how seriously they take their job of providing reliable 911 services to everyone in Massachusetts. He promised that the Department would do everything they can to keep an outage like this from happening again in the future.
While the 911 system was down, Boston’s Police Commissioner, Michael Cox, reminded people that it’s always good to know other ways to get help in an emergency. He was especially worried because very hot weather was expected in the Northeast. Cox urged people to call their local police departments directly if they needed help during the outage.
The 911 outage in Massachusetts was a troubling event that left many people feeling vulnerable. It’s a reminder of how much we rely on this critical emergency service.
The fact that a firewall caused the problem is especially concerning, since we trust these security systems to keep our important infrastructure safe from attacks. As officials continue to investigate exactly what went wrong, residents hope that steps will be taken to prevent anything like this from happening again.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.