911 services affected during nationwide cellular outage
LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY)– The widespread cell phone outage that impacted more than 70,000 people across the country also impacted people’s ability to call emergency responders. News 10 looked into how the call takers work to get emergency responders in Acadiana.
“The information that we got, it was very random,” Craig Stansbury, director for Lafayette 911, said. “Some people were able to use their phones, some weren’t. Sometimes a phone would work at a particular time. Then once again, a little bit later, the phone wouldn’t work. So it was very irregular and random on the usage of the phone and what the phone could do.”
AT&T says wireless network restored after widespread outage hit users across US
“I’m not familiar with whether we had an outage this large before like nationwide,” he added. “There have been smaller outages but not something to this magnitude that I can remember.”
He said they were notified by AT&T of the issues and the problems they were having. Therefore, they informed the call takers and monitored the calls to try to get information out to people if possible.
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“It’s just something that we’re aware of and try to work around if we possibly can but unfortunately, it was people not able to call us so it’s kind of hard for us to do anything about that. So it’s just something that we really try to work through until it’s resolved and we just stay in touch with AT&T so we can stay up to date on the latest developments,” he said. “Most people that are calling 911 or it’s some type of an emergency. So I would say it’s of the utmost importance for someone to be able to get out and get to 911 so we can get them the help that they need.”
Stansbury told News 10 there are some things they do to protect themselves to make sure they are still able to make calls in and out if they need to.
“We actually have more than one carrier,” Stansbury said. “So, if one carrier goes out, we can switch over to a second carrier to be able to use that. Unfortunately, that’s probably not practical for most people that just have to use their phones on a regular basis to be able to do that but that’s a precaution that we take.”
AT&T shared an apology for the outage Thursday after service was restored.
“We have restored wireless service to all our affected customers. We sincerely apologize to them. Keeping our customers connected remains our top priority, and we are taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again,” a statement from the AT&T spokesperson read.
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