HARRISBURG (TNS) — Pennsylvania residents were thrown into a panic earlier this month when they got an alert that state 911 systems were down, an outage that lasted around 24 hours.

Dauphin County residents were even more concerned a week later when they got an alert that county 911 operations were down for around two hours.

The back-to-back outages on July 11 and 19 raised questions among residents even after the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association said the statewide outage wasn’t a cyber attack and Dauphin County said the two issues weren’t related.

What exactly is going on with 911? And should residents expect more outages?

The state outage on Friday July 11 was due to a software issue, according to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association (PEMA). Comtech, a service provider for 911 services in various states including Pennsylvania, noticed the need to make an update in another state’s system. Comtech pushed the update to all their customers, triggering a defect in Pennsylvania that caused intermittent outages in the commonwealth’s system.

PEMA is conducting a root-cause analysis and will have more information in a few weeks. PEMA Executive Deputy Director Jeffrey Boyle said the outage was an “anomaly” and a “unique situation.” He said PEMA, Comtech and counties are working on steps to prevent future outages.

During the statewide outage, people could still call 911 centers via their non-emergency numbers.

Dauphin County’s 911 outage was due to a hardware issue, or what Dauphin County Public Safety Director Jeff Enders labeled a “sick switch.”

Dauphin County dispatchers noticed some callers couldn’t hear them on Saturday July 19. They alerted management, who contacted in-house IT workers and software IT workers to diagnose the problem.

“We weren’t really down, but it really wasn’t the optimum set of circumstances,” Enders said.

After a little more than an hour of callers struggling to hear dispatchers, Dauphin County 911 management made the decision to transfer calls to Cumberland County.

They had six technicians working on-site communicating with remote IT workers, and Enders said they didn’t want a technician to flip the wrong switch or play with the wrong wire and cause another problem. So they sent the warning and transferred the calls.

Ten minutes later, IT told Enders it was fixed. They did about an hour more of testing before returning all their 911 calls back to Dauphin County dispatchers.

The “sick switch” was just that: a malfunctioning switch, somewhere in what looks like a tangled set of wires in the server room Dauphin County Emergency Communications center.

It wasn’t due to Comtech or other issues with internet and data servers that would connect to another statewide issue.

“There is no connection. Like, there’s not some conspiracy,” Enders said. “The only true ‘connection’ is that technology is great when it’s working, but when it gets sick or does something funky, it’s a problem.”

Pennsylvania isn’t the only state to experience 911 outages recently. Last year, four states had major 911 outages after a cut fiber led to technical issues. 911 centers across the nation have also struggled with staffing issues.

While some states are facing issues due to outdated technology, Pennsylvania just finished a three-year upgrade to the state’s 911 system.

The transformation took an incredible amount of effort and coordination from multiple agencies while the public was largely unaware, said Boyle, of PEMA. The end result is a more reliable and effective system, but with the rollout, there have been a few bumps in the road.

New technology and a learning curve

The Next Generation 911 system, or NG911, is a digital, internet-based system that replaces the former analog 911 system.

It was implemented in Pennsylvania in April 2025 after a painstaking, county-by-county process. Lessons can be learned from what went wrong in July, but what went right with NG911 is just as important, officials say.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) didn’t upgrade the 911 system on a whim. The former 911 system was decades old and had to be replaced. Even more urgent, the state’s service provider expressed its desire to leave the business, so Pennsylvania had to do something.

It was part of a nationwide push towards NG911. In 2024, the Federal Communications Commission began requiring service providers that allow users to make 911 calls to transition to NG911.

Boyle said Next Generation 911 projects are complex. It involves planning and coordination between seemingly endless stakeholders: The incumbent 911 service provider, the new 911 service provider, phone companies and the county 911 center, also known as a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). PSAPs have various vendors they work with during the transition, like the computer dispatch system vendor and their recording vendor.

Each moving piece must know what the other is doing and how they rely on one another. There are dozens of ways things could go wrong, but in Pennsylvania, there were no major hiccups.

“I take it as a success story,” Boyle said. “The general public probably had no idea that transition was occurring, that’s how seamless it was.”

PEMA had detailed plans to implement the system in each county including how it would be tested. The first successful implementation was in September 2022 in Elk County. PEMA went from west to east across the commonwealth, meaning Dauphin County was among the last to fully implement the system, completing their upgrade in August 2024.

Under NG911, calls are routed to one of two data centers in the state for processing by one of four instances of Next Generation Core Services (NGCS). Location of the exact data center isn’t public for safety reasons. Through NGCS, the caller’s location is accurately determined and sent to the correct 911 center, which handles their emergency.

The prior 911 model, Enhanced 911 (E911), was more reliant on cell phone lines. Dauphin County had seven lines coming in through the Paxtang substation. If they lost those lines, their capacity would go down from 12 calls at a time to eight calls at a time. Verizon would call the 911 center and try to reroute traffic.

Now, there could be a number of things causing an outage, which can take more time to diagnose. But Enders says the benefits of NG9911 far outweigh the bumps in the road.

“The benefits, the backup, the surety of it are amazing,” Enders said. “It works with today’s technology, which is what today’s customer wants it to do. You want to know where someone is when that help is needed.”

NG911 has accurate, real-time location. E911 wasn’t as accurate, and full details could take 24 hours to reach a 911 center.

The National Emergency Number Association (NENA), a nonprofit advocating for 911 services, is a proponent of NG911 services. They stress the shortcomings of analog systems, especially when compared to the enhanced location services.

“In an information rich world that we communicate in today, to have data and information stripped away from a call that we could get from your wireless device is simply unacceptable,” NENA Senior Advisor Brian Fontes said. “Because if you have this information rich 911 call, it will allow for field responders to better prepare for the emergency they’re arriving to.”

Location of callers is paramount to Dauphin County’s services because of high tourism and the many highways. Enders said callers are often confused if they’re on Route 81, 83 or 283, and which direction they are traveling. An accurate location helps the dispatcher send emergency services to the right location, saving time.

Part of the tourism in Dauphin County stems from Hershey Park, which presents its own set of problems. Some technology, like Apple Watches, monitor the amount of G-force its wearer is experiencing. When it gets too high, the device sends an automatic alert to a 911 center that its user was in a car crash. Dauphin County gets these alerts when people are on roller coasters in Hershey Park, but with NG911, they can see, in real-time, the device-wearer going in a loop on a roller coaster.

The other benefit of NG911 are the redundancies, or backup plans, built into the system.

Before NG911, rerouting calls to another county would be a last resort that took time and a complicated process. With Dauphin County’s recent outage, it was a “key stroke of a computer.”

“The 911 world is still somewhat new to the technology so we’re rapidly finding new things we didn’t do before,” Enders said. “Like letting your IT guys have an hour or two to fix a problem. Let the other county answer the phone for a little bit, and we’ll get theirs too if needed.”

NG911 also doesn’t require. a physical building. If the Dauphin County 911 center burned down, they could answer calls with a laptop and headphones. Before, if the building was lost in an emergency, the county 911 services would be lost, too.

Despite any challenges dealing with vendors under the new system, the amount of wires and switches in the physical building has halved. Enders said three air conditioners had to be in the room containing wires and switches to offset the heat of the technology and it was still hot in the room, but now, only one unit keeps it cool.

Dispatchers are also more equipped to deal with non-English speakers. Before NG911, if a caller spoke a different language, a dispatcher would have to find a translator, costing precious time. The system now translates what the caller is saying for the dispatcher.

There are other capabilities Pennsylvania hasn’t fully tapped into yet. NG911 has capabilities to incorporate photos and videos, which will be introduced in the coming years, Boyle said.

The 911 world is connected and constantly finding new ways to provide quick, accurate service for people experiencing emergencies.

He’s had meetings with other counties and PEMA in the week since the outage and plans to have more conversations in the coming weeks.

Will another outage occur?

It is impossible to ensure the new 911 centers will work perfectly, all the time — but that was never true.

Many people experienced 911 outages they didn’t even know about because 20 years ago, almost no one had a smart phone, so they didn’t get the public notifications delivered to them instantly.

Many times when something goes wrong in a 911 center, it doesn’t escalate to the level that causes a notification to the public.

The bottom line is, there is always a risk that technology can go wrong.

“We’ve had outages with the prior system,” Boyle said. “There’s always a risk with technology but we want people to be confident that us, the counties and Comtech have taken a lot of steps to prevent issues from happening.”

The upgraded system is helping first responders get to the scene quicker and helping dispatchers send them there.

“Some issues are unpreventable,” Enders said. “But with the new technology, there’s just so many more things it can do.”

NENA is pushing toward more advancements with NG911. Fontes doesn’t believe the state is in “end-stage NG911″ yet.

The nonprofit is pushing Congress to invest in 911 services so all states can have updated technology. A 2018 report said it would cost between $9.7 and $12.7 billion to upgrade the nation’s 911 centers to NG911. That number only grows over time, and nothing has been done on the federal level to help 911 centers.

“Policymakers at all levels of government need to understand that 911 is the vital public safety service,” Fontes said. “It is the first call that starts the whole triage of emergency responses. More so today than ever before, it’s vital to the safety and security of a community”

Fontes noted people are often traveling through multiple states and jurisdictions. If one state has NG911 and another doesn’t, the communication between 911 centers will be substandard. That’s why NENA is pushing for federal intervention.

If a 911 center goes down, people should call their county’s non-emergency number, which can be found on the county website. This still goes straight to the 911 center, just without the added perks that NG911 offers. Callers might have to give more detail on their location, but they are still speaking with a dispatcher.

The state’s new system has been stable for the three years it’s been in operation. It handles roughly 23,000 calls a day, and it’s handled about 250,000 calls since the July 11 outage. Boyle expressed his “full faith” in the system.

At NENA, Fontes compared NG911 to an expensive sports car that needs to be serviced.

“If you own a Ferrari and you had to take it in to get serviced, you’re not going to throw away the Ferrari,” Fontes said. “You’re going to get it serviced. There are times where there will be hiccups, no matter what the system is. And you’ve got to correct those hiccups. You’ve got to learn from those hiccups and you’ve got to prevent similar hiccups going forward.”